The Right to Die

A doctor has no right to speed a patient's end by euthanasia, or "mercy killing," no matter how hopeless his condition. But neither, declares Dr. Francis T. Hodges, 48, a general practitioner in San Francisco, has the doctor any right to prolong a "hopeless" patient's life by extraordinary feats of medicine.

"There has been too little said," says Dr. Hodges in the California-Western Academy Monthly, "of a legitimate right, a God-given right, of the dying man. That is his right to die ... The hopelessly ill patient need not, through a distorted sense of professional duty, be subjected to heroic and extraordinary measures, whose only purpose can be prolongation of an existence that has become intolerable. But it must be the patient himself who declines the measures . . .

"It is incumbent upon the profession to recognize this death right . . . What is the triumph of a surgically quartered body maintained alive? ... Let us sense those times when we must not reach into the bottom of our medicine bags for agents to whip into a body tired unto death a final, additionally exhausting further fight against death, a death for which the patient is already prepared . . . There are worse things than death . . . There are times when the patient has legal, ethical, moral and religious justification of his request to be allowed to die in peace."

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