DOCTORS AS EXECUTIONERS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3413, 3 January 1912, Page 8

DOCTORS AS EXECUTIONERS.

Discussing suggestions which have been put forward rec-etnly hat in certain cases medical men should be empowered to inflict painless death on sufferers, the British Medical Journal says :

“So long as the profession of medicine keeps its present high standard of duty doctors will absolutely decline to act the part of executioners. The very reason of their existence is the prolongation of life, ancl if they allowed themselves to became the instruments of murder on any pretext, however plausible, they would justly lose the confidence of tfie public. If it is to be made a part of the doctor’s duty to hasten a man’s passage into the other world, his very presence would necessarily be associated with the idea of death. He would enter the sick room into which he should bring life and hope, with the dark shadow of death behind him.

“The suggestion that the patient himself should be allowed to take his quietus is in the highest degree anti-social. If, for the sake of argument, it be granted that it is lawful for a man to shorten his life by way of escape from suffering, it would be impossible ,o limit the application of the \ lineiple. If a mail is to be encouraged to take h own life when he is iT, it must necessarily follow that people suffering from the pangs of despised love, ihe loss of fortune, or anything else that sec ms to make life unbearable, si ould be allowed to do the same. The result would be, in this age of hysteria and overstrained nerves, that suicide, which in some countries is already too common, would become a matter of everyday occurrence, and there would be suicide clubs like that imagimd.bv Robert Louis Stevenson, nd institutions such as ‘L’Endormeuse,’ dcsrriKd by M. Maupassant, in which anyone tired of life could get rid of it m the easiest way amidst flowers and to the accompaniment of slow mus' •. “It seems to us that this talk of the right to die and the wrongdoing of doctors in seeking to prolong a life that is hanging by a thread springs from the unwholesome sentimentalism and the inevitable accompaniment of selfishness which are among the unhappy notes of the present time.”