Robert Martensen

In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, Martensen said health care in the United States left many stakeholders dissatisfied. He said hospital administrators were unhappy because they had to focus on profit, patients felt isolated, and some physicians were quitting because they could not practice medicine in the way they wanted.

In Martensen's 2008 book, Chapter 7, "Life in the Narrows", discusses the death of his father. Instead of having a bad death (dysthanasia) that can occur in hospitals, Martensen thought his father's death was relatively good. His father was 86, septic, had deteriorating lung function, an advance directive with a DNR, and he had started to receive morphine for air hunger. Alternatively, Martensen's father could have been put on a mechanical ventilator. However, that would have violated both Martensen and his father's wishes. Martensen explained that .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}

He was a recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship towards the completion of his book The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press. In 2008, Martensen's book A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Martensen was educated at Harvard University (B.A., 1969), Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth (M.D., 1974), and the University of California, San Francisco (M.A. and Ph.D., 1993).

Robert Lawrence Martensen (January 1, 1947, Lake County, Ohio – September 26, 2013, Pasadena, California) was an American physician, historian, and author.