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When Physicians Choose to Participate in the Death of Their Patients: Ethics and Physician-Assisted Suicide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

David C. Thomasma
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Extract

Physicians have long aided their patients in dying in an effort to ease human suffering. It is only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the prolongation of life has taken on new meaning due to the powers now available to physicians, through new drugs and high technology interventions. Whereas earlier physicians and patients could readily acknowledge that nothing further could be done, today that judgment is problematic.

Most often, aiding the dying took the form of not doing anything further to prolong life. Morally, this act of restraint was not difficult, because few options could have been considered. However, some physicians, rarely, would help patients die either by hastening death directly or by increasing pain control with the risk of hastening death, the so-called double effect. When directly hastening death, physicians either directly caused the death of the patient through euthansia, or supplied the means to the patient to bring about death with or without encouragement to use these means. The latter is physician-assisted suicide (PAS).

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Fall 1996 , pp. 183 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1996

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References

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