Editorial September 28, 1899 Issue

Hamlet's Question Answered

Editor

Judge Simeon E. Baldwin of Connecticut, president of the American Bar Association, recently gave a mild shock to readers of the newspapers by the publication of a paper read by him before the American Social Science Association, containing the daring statement of his opinion, that doctors have a moral and legal right to let patients die without attempting to prolong their existence, when there seems to be no chance of their ultimate recovery. No doubt Judge Baldwin thought he was breaking a new path for the medical men to walk in, but he must have since concluded that his views on this subject are almost old-fashioned, for Dr. Nehemiah Nickerson of Meriden, Conn., —a physician of excellent standing in his profession, who served with distinction as a surgeon in the Civil War,—hastens into print with an almost boastful confession that he actually puts patients out of their misery when they ask him to, by giving them a fatal dose of chloroform. Some other physicians are bold enough to make the same confession and to uphold Dr. Nickerson in his contention that it is right sometimes for doctors to kill where they cannot cure.

It is but just to say that many physicians heartily denounce Dr. Nickerson and his contention for the right to kill, but even physicians of unstained hands do not treat Dr. Nickerson's assertion that all doctors on occasion do as he does as if it were an awful libel against the medical profession; they do not treat the matter as though such things are unknown, but rather as though they represented a disagreeable phase of professional practice which it is embarrassing to speak about.

Some of the physicians who have given their opinions to the newspapers condemn the chloroforming practice on the ground that it is not right because materia medica lacks so much of being a science that it is impossible in any case, no matter how serious it seems, to be absolutely sure that the patient will not recover. This view of the question is very earnestly insisted upon by some of the most eminent men of the medical profession, a fact which incidentally confirms the statement we have so often made that materia medica is not scientific but that it is a mixture of superstition and guesswork.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

Anxiety for To-morrow