Robert Martensen

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

Martensen worked as physician in emergency room and intensive care unit settings and as a professor at Harvard Medical School and Tulane University, teaching bioethics and medical history. After Hurricane Katrina, he moved to Maryland to work for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as the director of the Office of History.

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.

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.

Martensen criticizes end-of-life care in the United States. While most Americans die in nursing homes or hospitals, Martensen says neither are properly oriented to care for dying patients. In nursing homes, management may not want death to occur on-site, so the individual will be sent to the emergency room, and in a hospital, a dying patient may be subject to intrusive medical technology instead of palliative care (which may result from the incentives and disincentives in health insurance coverage).

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