Still-Life? Chinese Doctors Take 'Surgical Selfies' Beside Anesthetized Patients On Operating Table

Would you have a problem with your surgical team taking a selfie while your anesthetized body lay on an operating table in the background? Apparently, in China this is considered bad manners. There, health authorities fired a deputy president, a head nurse, and a person in charge of anesthetics, and ordered a one-year period of probation for the president of a private hospital in the north-central city of Xi’an, following such an incident.

Mid-surgery, the medical staff posed for a series of group self-portraits beside knocked-out patients at Fengcheng Hospital.

Though the pics were snapped last August, they only appeared on Weibo, a microblogging social media website, over the weekend. Public outrage soon followed.

“How horrible! Would they still be able to smile if their loved ones were lying on the surgical table?” commented a user named Zhongguangwei2010 (reported by Bloomberg).

In a statement issued on Sunday, the Xi'an Bureau of Public Health said that taking selfies violated proper medical procedures and requested everyone involved in the scandal offer "deep" self-criticisms. (Apparently, the truth sessions of the Cultural Revolution linger on). The bureau also demanded the hospital itself issue an open apology and correct its protocol in order to avoid similar incidents in the future.

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