DEATH A KINDNESS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 66, 9 November 1931, Page 5

DEATH A KINDNESS

WELL KNOWN MEDICAL MAN IS ADVGCATE OF EUTHANASIA KILLING A MERCY LONDON, Saturday. Shonld a human being he ref tised the mercy extended to every suffering animal? The question is raised by Dr. Killick Millard's presidential address to the Medieal Health Officers' Society in London, when he advocated legalisation of voluntary eiithanasia for sufferers from incurable, fatal diseases, such as caneer. Drawing attention to the serious increase in the number of deaths caused by cancer, Dr, Killick Millard advocated the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia- for sufferers from incurable fatal diseases entailing a slow and painful death, thus substituting a painless end. This, he said,.would not be contrary to true! morality. It should not be regarded as an act of mercy, but an elementary human right. The best proceedure for administering euthanasia . under legal safeguards would be a lethal narcotie draught, or if the patient was nnable to swallow, a hypodermic injection. Public opinion eventually would overcome the prejudice in regard to euthanasia as a courageous, rational and often altruistic course. On the same day as Dr. Millard made his startling pronouncement a man was charged before a Somerset court with having murdered his mother. "I could not see her suffer and hear her groan any more," declared Frederick Cox, charged at Welling---ton, Somerset, with the murder of his mother, who suffer ed from delusion. "I did it out of a heart of love. She asked me to shoot her right through the heart." The father testified that Frederick dearly loved his mother. The accused was committed for trial. Doctors Condemn While advocates of euthanasia, or "painless death," stress the mercy of release from suffering in extreme incurable cases, it is only six years ago that Sir John Bland Sutton, speaking for English surgeons, said their opinion was unanimously against it. He referred to the case of Stanislawa Uminska, the heautiful Polish actress, who in 1925 shot her dying lover rather than see him . suffer in hospital, A French jury acquitted her. This made the third acquittal in three months. In the same year Dr. Elner Blazer, of Denver (U.S.A.), killed his imbecile limhles's daughter for a similar reason. A jury acquitted him. In 1927 an English jury acquitted Albert Davies who drowned his three-year-old daughter, because she had an incurable_ growth which had eaten "away her face. • In England, in the same year Mrs. Delavigne poisoned her mother, who was suffering agony with incurable cancer. To save Mrs. Delavigne the ordeal of a trial she was prouneed insane, and released shortly afterwards. "Better Dead" Yladimir Orlossky, in Leningrad Russia, in 1928 killed his three-year-ald idiot son. He was found guilty and sentenced to six months imprisonment, which was immediately suspended. The Council of Parents had passed a resoulution that the child was better dead. In Sydney a few years ago a son procured for his bed-ridden father the revolver with which the father gained release from pain. His illness was incurable, and the old man had implored one membeij of the family after another to give him poison or a gun. The son was eventually freed. Though both legal and religious opinion are against euthanasia, there is a large "silent vote" for it as the many acquittals hy juries prove.