The Right to Kill

"Five times have I taken a life. . . . "The first case was a newborn child, clearly doomed to imbecility. With the squeeze of my finger and thumb, I had taken a life. "In the second case, the child was born without a skullcap. "The third case was that of a farmer suffering from an incurable and agonizing disease. He died clasping my hand, and murmuring, 'God bless you, doctor.' "The fourth case was a man suffering from the same disease and unable to eat, drink or sleep. He was in agony beyond the torment of the damned. He also died with a smile on his face and with his hand in mine. "The fifth case [had] the same disease.* I had no hesitation in ending his life." The author of this confession, printed last week in the London Daily Mail, added that his conscience had never stabbed him, that he would act similarly in similar circumstances, that he would willingly face "any tribunal in the land." He was described as a kind-eyed, elderly country doctor. His statement was "anonymous." But whatever the facts behind the Mail's fat story, it could hardly have aroused more controversy had it been printed as a signed and sworn affidavit in the solemn Times. Medical bigwigs on two continents last week spoke their minds as to the rightness or wrongness of murder for mercy. Pungent, voluble Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the American Medical Association's Journal, observed that the average doctor frequently faces the problem, that when it is a matter between him and his patient he may generally decide it in his own way without interference. The Rockefeller Institute's famed Nobel Prizeman Alexis Carrel declared that sentimental prejudice should not obstruct the quiet and painless disposition of incurables, criminals, hopeless lunatics.

Dr. Henri Coutard, chief of staff of Paris' Curie Institute: "Men born crippled or feeble-minded have been responsible for some of the great works of art. Why should their lives be taken?"

Dr. William Alanson White of Washington, No. 1 U. S. practicing psychiatrist: "Dangerous business."

Dr. Max Cutler, Chicago cancer specialist: "We do not have the moral right."

Emotional Britons have been excited about "mercy killing" since the pardon acquittal of Mother May Brownhill for poisoning and asphyxiating her imbecile son Dennis (TIME, March 11). Lord Moynihan of the Royal College of Surgeons is pushing the "Right to Die" movement, backed by the Earl of Listowel and Lord Denman, onetime Governor General of Australia. Last week Lord Moynihan deprecated the Mail story as a cheap advertisement, said his group would put his proposition sensibly to the British public in December, try to get a permissive bill through Parliament.

*Presumably cancer.

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