40 cc. of Air

Mrs. Abbie Borroto was caught in a slow, wrenching, inexorable process; she was dying of cancer. She was a woman of 59, the mother of two daughters, a member of the" Manchester (N.H.) Grace Episcopal Church. As she lay in the neat, white bed in Hillsboro County Hospital, wasted from 140 to 80 pounds, there was nothing left for her but to wait in agony for the end.

Watching and listening at her bedside, her physician, Dr. Hermann N. Sander, was seized with pity. He knew the law and the precepts of the medical profession; he must not stand in judgment on the life of another human. But in his helplessness he felt, as had other healers, that he was in fact a judge and that he was sentencing his patient to useless pain and terror.

Death by Syringe. The doctor was a quiet, dark-haired, intense man of 41. As a youth he had been captain of the Dartmouth ski team; he had studied in Munich, had interned at Mountainside Hospital, Montclair, N.J., had practiced for years around Manchester. When he made his decision he carried it out quietly, with a trained physician's skill. He called a nurse, asked her for a hypodermic syringe; within a few minutes he made four 10 cc. injections of air into his patient's veins.

The air bubbles-moved to Mrs. Bor-roto's heart. She died quickly. With astonishing frankness, the doctor jotted down his action on a hospital record. He signed her death certificate, and left. Last week, 25 days later, a nurse at the hospital read the record, noted the lethal injection, reported to her superiors. Hospital officials reported to the authorities'. Confronted by the sheriff, Dr. Sander calmly admitted that he had caused Mrs. Borroto's death.

He was arrested, charged with murder and held in the Hillsboro County jail. He pleaded not guilty, told the sheriff: "I did it in a moment of weakness. But what I did was right morally. I have no regrets. I may have broken the law, but I committed no sin."

Indiscretion? Manchester did not seem to know how to react to the baffling news. One of Mrs. Borroto's brothers said: "As far as I am concerned [her suffering] should have been left to the will of God." Another brother told reporters: "Now that she is gone, she is better off." The woman's husband, a small, tight-lipped oil salesman, typed out a statement, referred to the doctor as a "wonderful man" and added: "I cannot believe that he is in any way to be blamed for my wife's passing." Doctor Sander had dozens of other sympathizers.

A good many people seemed to feel no interest at all in the moral point involved, simply wondered why Dr. Sander had committed the indiscretion of jotting his action on the record. County Medical Referee Robert E. Biron explained that it was the only clue to Dr. Sander's irregularity.: "Had he omitted that notation it would have been impossible to detect the cause of death as an air injection."

When reporters asked Dr. -Sander why he had made the notation, he refused to answer. At week's end, he was freed on $25,000 bail; a doctor and two insurance men signed a bond after judge and prosecutor agreed that he need not remain imprisoned. Said the doctor: ". . . Ultimately my position will be vindicated."

But a jury would have no easy decision; the law does not admit that there could be mercy or manipulation in death.

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