euthanasia

euthanasia The ideals of bodily incorruptibility and immortality have been envisaged in many cultures and religions: Christianity, for instance, holds that, had man not sinned and been expelled from Paradise, there would have been no disease and death. In truth, mortality has been the great, omnipresent mystery — beyond man's powers and in the hands of the gods or fate. Hence man has tried to tame death.

On the one hand, there have been efforts to prolong life with a view to creating quasi-eternal existence on earth. With the alchemy of the Middle Ages, partly borrowed from the Arabs, an ambitious quest for the prolongation of life entered Western culture. The thirteenth-century cleric Roger Bacon claimed that Christian medicine would surpass pagan science by the conquest of senescence. Francis Bacon and the later philosophers of the Enlightenment expressed confidence that the advancement of science would produce the indefinite prolongation of life.

On the other hand, there has been the ambition of mastering death, not by preventing it, but by controlling its timing, means, and manner. Within traditional Christian culture, a good death (as prescribed by the ars moriendi — the art of dying well) was a Christian death; departing in a state of grace, denouncing Satan, praying to God, repenting one's sins, and (for Roman Catholics) receiving the sacraments.

Increasingly, from the eighteenth century, the good death became a rather more secularized concept, and within that framework euthanasia assumed relevance. In its original meaning, however, ‘euthanasia’ referred to any means for securing an ‘easy’ death; for example, by leading a temperate life or by cultivating an acceptance of mortality. The Discorsi della vita sobria (Discourses on the Temperate Life) of Luigi Cornaro (c.1463–1566!), written in his eighties and frequently consulted into the eighteenth century, featured both an easy (or holy) terminus in advanced years and the prospect of longer life — up to 120 years — through the pursuit of moderation in food, drink, and lifestyle.

Francis Bacon praised prolongevity as the ‘most noble’ purpose of medicine. He also argued that relief of suffering was a desideratum in terminal care, and that the physician may sometimes hasten death. The Enlightenment brought intense interest in prolongevity. Benjamin Franklin boldly declared senescence to be not a natural process but a ‘disease’ to be cured, and he predicted that longevity might stretch to a thousand years or more. The Marquis Condorcet and William Godwin speculated about virtually immortal life.

But ‘euthanasia’ increasingly came to connote measures taken by the physician, including the possibility of hastening death to prevent pain or suffering. At the same time, the idea of dying well was secularized. The traditional good death scenario — calling upon God and renouncing Satan — gave way to an emphasis upon a quiet and peaceful death. Tranquil death, it was argued, should be like sleep. A peaceful death betokened a serene conscience, a life well lived. It squared with Romantic notions of the beauty of death, particularly in those who died young. Thus, in the new idea of euthanasia emerging in the nineteenth century, it was the duty of the doctor to ensure a peaceful death, by careful management, and judicious application of opiates to dull pain and induce coma. At the wishes of family or patient, the family doctor was doubtless the frequent agent of informal (and illegal) euthanasia in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Any trend there had been towards the informal acceptance of euthanasia was rendered more problematic in recent times. The Nazis introduced legal euthanasia, approved by doctors, for selected people such as the severely mentally disabled, on the grounds that they had a life which was not worth living. The later extension to persons considered simply undesirable — Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals — perverted euthanasia to supremely evil purposes. The Nazi ‘final solution’ has created suspicion that any broader acceptance, practice, or legalization of euthanasia would be the thin end of the wedge that in due course would lead to (possibly compulsory) public euthanasia programmes for problematic or costly people, especially the very old, the poor, and the demented.

In addition, death now increasingly occurs in public institutions, notably hospitals and hospices. This may make humane euthanasia more difficult, as physicians and nursing staff involved in such practices may be justifiably afraid that they thereby risk exposure and legal prosecution. Those liable to promote such exposure are established religious groups, including Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews and pressure groups such as ‘Life’. They fundamentally disapprove of mercy killing on religious grounds, and may believe that suffering is God's will and that God alone should determine when life ends.

Yet the conditions of modern death and recent developments in medicine are also increasing advocacy and desire for euthanasia. Life-saving and life-supporting technologies now make it possible to interrupt and extend the natural dying process. Resuscitation or antibiotics may defer death, and life may be sustained by ventilators or tube feeding when there is no prospect of recovery. It has become widely accepted that withholding or withdrawing treatment in such circumstances — for example for those with advanced cancer or paralysis, or in a permanent vegetative state — is good medical practice and also legal. At the same time developments in palliative care aim to ease the pain and distress of the conscious dying person by the judicious use of drugs. Such drugs may hasten death, but provided the intention is to control symptoms this is accepted morally and legally by the doctrine of double effect. Whilst these humane approaches — non-treatment decisions, and drugs for symptom control — are generally accepted, there remains acute controversy about the deliberate administration of lethal doses of drugs or other measures to ensure death, whether as active euthanasia, or ‘physician-assisted suicide’.

Euthanasia may be squared with the professional ethics of the physician and with normal morality through the argument that, while it is the doctor's duty to save life, that duty does not run so far as to prolong life through artificial means in all circumstances.

Changes in opinion, public policy, and medical practice have been most marked in the Netherlands, where since 1984 the national medical association has accepted medical euthanasia, under strictly controlled circumstances. Although this remained unlawful until 2001, there were no prosecutions provided that doctors abided by strict guidelines based on a patient's valid request. By 1995 a survey suggested that active euthanasia (a physician humanely intervening to end a terminally-ill patient's life at the request of that patient) was taking place in around 1.8% of all deaths. (In some 87% of such cases, the patient was expected to be able to live, or to be kept alive, only for a further month.) Public acceptance of this practice had been facilitated by the development of ‘living wills’. Since 1994 in the Netherlands, physicians have been legally obliged to honour ‘living wills’ — a measure welcomed by the medical profession as it absolves them of legal problems. Acceptance of euthanasia seems equally widespread amongst religious and non-religious Dutch people, though members of the Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church still tend to be distrustful of the practice. Such practices have met with a much more divided reception elsewhere. In Britain, where euthanasia remains illegal, the pressure group Exit has been subject to prosecution, as has the controversial American pathologist, Dr Jack Kevorkian, who has advocated and participated in doctor-assisted suicide at the patient's request.

The advance of modern medicine presents deep dilemmas. If a patient is in a permanent coma, should life support measures be employed? And should a patient near death from both painful cancer and debilitating heart disease be resuscitated? No easy answers are available to any such questions, which set the sanctity of human life against the question of personal autonomy, and raise fundamental legal and moral questions as to the ownership of the body.

Roy Porter, and Bryan Jennett

Bibliography

Baruch, A. B. (ed.) (1989). Suicide and euthanasia: historical and contemporary themes. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
British Medical Association (2001). Withholding and withdrawing life-prolonging medical treatment: guidance for decision making. 2nd ed BMJ Books, London.

See also death; eugenics; suicide; vegetative state.