THE extent to which some people would be willing to place "the issues of life and death" in the hands of physicians, is shown in a symposium on euthanasia in a recent issue of the Medical Review of Reviews, and it is perhaps just as well, at the beginning, to give the meaning of this high-sounding word euthanasia in plain every-day English as it appears in the Standard dictionary, which is, "A means for producing a gentle and easy death."
The question discussed by the contributors to this symposium was whether physicians should resort to means for producing death in cases which they considered hopeless. One physician who favored this way of ending the suffering of his patients, went so far as to say that he had taken the responsibility of producing euthanasia in more than one case, and that he knew of other physicians who had done the same. He also stated that he had "been told by high legal authority that to do this is equivalent, in the eyes of the law, to committing murder. Nevertheless, no one need allow his conscience to trouble him on this score."
Another physician, who did not agree with the views of this gentleman, had something to say on the question of the uncertainty of prognosis, and very pertinently asked, "Is prediction of imminent death a safe thing, even for the wisest?" If we are to accept the testimony of the thousands who under Christian Science treatment have recovered after they had been given up by physicians, we must take the side of the one who doubts the infallibility of prognosis. It is also much to the credit of the medical profession that the majority of those who took part in this discussion did not agree with the gentleman whose conscience is not hampered by "the eyes of the law."
