And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.

Dooling's short story "Bush Pigs" was read as part of Selected Shorts a program produced by Symphony Space in New York and aired on NPR. Works
Novels
Critical Care (1992)
White Man's Grave (1994)
Brain Storm (1998)
Bet Your Life (2002)
The Journals of Eleanor Druse (writing as Eleanor Druse) (2004)

Nonfiction
Blue Streak: Swearing Free Speech and Sexual Harassment (1996)
Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ (2008)

As contributor or editor
Rendezvous in Black by Cornell Woolrich. In Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ (2008) he explores the implications of machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence.

Dooling was born in Omaha Nebraska and is a graduate of Saint Louis University (1976) and Saint Louis University School of Law (1987). Dooling's short story "Bush Pigs" was read as part of Selected Shorts a program produced by Symphony Space in New York and aired on NPR. Dooling's first novel Critical Care (1992) was made into a 1997 movie of the same title directed by Sidney Lumet and starring James Spader and Kyra Sedgwick.