SHOULD DOCTORS KILL?

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 2003, 15 July 1919, Page 1

SHOULD DOCTORS KILL?

(By C. Kenneth Burrow.) The usual and inevitable protests have followed the statement by Mr Ingleby Oddie, the London coroner, that he had no doubt a time would come when painless anaesthesia would be brought about for those suffering from incurable and agonising diseases. It is a difficult question, and involves a good deal more than appears at first sight. The legal sanction of such a rightmight seem to open the way for fraud, or, worse still, the satisfaction of personal hatred or revenge. But fraud and malignity can find a way without sanction, and the criminal or homicidal doctor has ample opportunities already. But the actual risk in that direction is very slight, since it is obvious that the right would have to be hedged about with safeguards, such, for instance, as that the hopelessness of the case should be attested by two or three independent consulting physicians. The clearly expressed desire of the patient is, of course, pre-supposed.

Do doctors themselves desire this sanction; I have discussed the question with various types of physicians, and I have found them reluctant to express an opinion. This is natm’al enough, for the doctor is too nearly concerned to talk at large on so grave a matter to casual inquiries.

Those who hold the Christian faith in its simplicity certainly would not desire this sanction, nor would they act upon it. Those holding it on broader, grounds and regarding it as capable of individual interpretation might. It would become a matter of substituting for the strict moral law a principle of humanitarian ethics.

It is, of 00111*56, impossible to argue with those who believe that pain is a divinely ordained purifier of the spirit, and that it should therefore be permitted to rack the body till the spirit leaves it. That pain has precisely the opposite effect on many temperaments proves, to them, merely that such sufferers are unregenerate. Yet those who argue this seldom refuse, in their own ease, the temporary relief of morphia. How many doctors would care to accept the responsibility of an act

so grave, so bound up with the eternal mystery of life itself? Very few, I believe. And this killing for kindness’ sake would have to be done by the patient’s own doctor, otherwise we should have a small body of men free from moral compunction in tin's direction who would be willing to act as authorised slayers. And that would never do.

Probably in special cases doctors already exercise their right of individual conscience in this matter. Perhaps it had bettor rest at that.