Word: patient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Doctors defend such decisions as a part of the practice of medicine. "What is the point," asks one Manhattan physician, "of restarting a terminal cancer patient's stopped heart so that he can survive in agony for a few more weeks?" But almost all doctors are decidedly uneasy about terminating treatment once it has been started, especially if doing so will mean the certain death of a patient. Many doctors, after all, are taught to regard death as an enemy and to do all they can to defeat it-or at least to keep...
Exercising this responsibility would be easier if the courts were not involved, says Kimball. "A physician's task is to aid the patient, not to make the patient suffer unduly, and to use his judgment when to prolong and when not to prolong life. A court cannot decide in total detail what a physician...
Many theologians make a sharp distinction between euthanasia and allowing the patient to die a natural death, usually by failing to take extraordinary or heroic measures. Direct action to kill people who suffer pain or are deemed worthless has always been opposed by both Christianity and Judaism (in contrast to many of the religions and philosophies of the ancient world). It was a simple matter of applying the general commandment against murder: "The innocent and just man thou shall not put to death" (Exodus...
...Christianity, in common with a large body of secular thought, also holds that the patient, the family and their doctors are not morally required to use every conceivable means to sustain a damaged life. In Catholicism, which has the most developed literature on such questions, one notable exponent of this view was the brilliant 17th century Spanish Cardinal Juan de Lugo, who said "ordinary" efforts are required, but "extraordinary" methods...
...there is no doubt that use of the respirator in the Quinlan case falls within Catholicism's definition of "extraordinary." In 1957 when Pope Pius XII reaffirmed the centuries-old view on "extraordinary" means in an address to anesthesiologists, he included removal of a respirator "to allow the patient who is already virtually dead to pass away in peace." A few years later, a Church of England study pamphlet said all such life-support machines should have only one purpose: to keep vital organs going until doctors can tell whether the organs can ever again function on their...