Article September 21, 1899 Issue

Has a Man a Right to Die?

Times-Herald

When medical science has looked at a man's tongue and thumped his chest and has finally determined that he is suffering from an "incurable disease," has medical science any right to prolong his suffering by filling his internal regions with nux vomica or cinchona?

In other words, when the wise old "saddle-bags" have put their heads together and have finally decided that a malady with which a man is afflicted is necessarily fatal, has the man "a natural right to a natural death," or must he allow the doctors to drench his intestinal canal with the various compounds and elixirs known to the pharmacopœia?

This was the grave question discussed by Judge Simeon E. Baldwin, president of the American Bar Association, in an address delivered at Saratoga before the American Social Science Association. Judge Baldwin, who is a ripe scholar and an authority upon constitutional law, maintains that the practice of keeping alive a patient who is suffering from an incurable disease, and thus prolonging his misery and discomfort, is the product of old-time superstitions in regard to death which taught most men to believe that final dissolution meant a plunge into a state of agonizing torture. Almost any man was therefore willing to employ all the potencies of medical skill to postpone the brimstone bath as long as possible.

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