I
The proposal to forestall a painful death by a painless one is not,
to normal sensibilities, “shocking.” If persuaded of its expediency
no physician should give it a hesitating advocacy through fear of
being thought brutal. It is an error to suppose that familiarity with
death and suffering exhausts the springs of compassion in one born
compassionate. Like many other qualities, compassion grows by use: none
has more of it than the physician, the nurse, the soldier in war. He
to whom the menace of an injustice is a louder voice than the call of
conscience has no standing in the House of Pain, no warrant to utter
judgment as to the conduct of its affairs.
Pain is cruel, death is merciful. Prolongation of a mortal agony is
hardly less barbarous than its infliction. Who when sane in mind and
body would not choose to guard himself against a futile suffering by
an assurance of accelerated release? Every memory is charged with
instances, observed or related, of piteous appeals for death from the
white lips of agony, yet how rarely can these formulate the prayer!
To its concession, regulated by law, there is the objection that
law is frangible and judgment fallible. But that objection has no
greater cogency in this than in other matters; laws we must have, and
execute them with such care as we can. Our courts sometimes err in the
diagnosis of crime, yet they warrant our trust in the general service
of our need. The mariner’s compass is fallible, the winds baffle and
the waves destroy; yet we have navigation. Even the anarchist cries
out against law, not because it does not accomplish its purpose, but
because, roughly, it does.
We build civilization with such tools as we have; if we waited for
perfect ones the structure would never rise. The juror is no more
nearly just and infallible than the physician; if we can entrust
ourselves with death as a penalty for crime we need not shrink from
the no more awful responsibility of according it as a boon to hopeless
pain. In neither case can a blunder do more than hasten the inevitable.
“When I was born I cried,” said a philosopher; “now I know why.” He
did not know why; it was because at the moment of his birth Nature
spoke the sentence of his death.
It may be that proponents of euthanasia for suffering incurables are
pushing their adventurous feet too far ahead in the march of mind to
expect anything better in the nature of encouragement than a copious
dead-catting and bad-egging from laggard processionists arear.
Sometimes, however, they get decenter treatment than they have the
hardihood to claim: occasionally, through the roar of calumniation is
heard the voice of dull and dignified protestation, even of argument.
For example, _The British Medical Journal_ once pointed out, with
more gravity than grammar, that “the medical profession has always
strongly set its face against a measure that would inevitably pave
the way to the grossest abuses, and which would degrade them to the
position of executioners.”
I don’t know that the medical profession speaks with any special
authority in a matter of this kind. Perhaps it knows a little better
than other trades and professions that cases of hopeless agony are
of frequent occurrence, but as to the expediency of relieving them
by the compassionate _coup de grâce_—of that a physician is no
better judge than anyone else. As to the fear of being “degraded to the
position of executioners,” the position is not degrading. The office of
executioner—even when execution is punishment, not mercy—is, and should
be considered, an almost sacred office. Its popular disrepute harks
back to the bad old days when a majority of the people in countries
now partly civilized were criminal in act or sympathy, living in hate
and terror of the law—the days of Tyburn Tree with its roaring mobs,
cheering the malefactor and pelting the hangman. It was not from fear
of a merely social reprobation that the mediæval headsman wore a mask;
it was from fear of being torn to pieces if ever recognized unguarded
in the public street. A man of to-day, ambitious to prove his descent
from a criminal ancestry, can most easily do so by damning the hangman.
His humble origin is no disgrace to him if he is a good citizen, but it
makes him invincible to the suasion of argument against his fad. One
might as profitably attempt to reform the color of his eyes or dissuade
him from the shape of his nose.