Medical efforts to prolong the lives of individuals afflicted with serious disease or injury began with primitive medicine, perhaps in the Neolithic Period (8000-3000 B.C.), when we discerned from paleontologic evidence a tendency for primitive men and women to care for the sick and wounded in the shelters provided by the deep caves of Europe. […]
Life-Prolonging Measures Read More »
Physicians classify diseases in a variety of ways. Clinical classifications are often made according to either the suddenness of onset or the expected prognosis. Diseases are considered acute if they develop suddenly and have a short clinical course. Chronic diseases, on the other hand, have a slow onset, indolent course, and long duration. They heal
Since the time of Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.), the Father of Medicine, physicians have traditionally subscribed to doing no harm and prescribed what is in the best interest of their individual patients; in other words, putting their patients first. This concept is known as individual-based ethics. The new bioethics movement, on the other hand, subscribes to
Bioethics — The Life and Death Issue Read More »
March 20, 2002Dear Mr. Smith, You have done a great service to the public as well as to the medical profession with your groundbreaking books, Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope From Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder (1997) and Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America (2000).(1,2) You have brought to the forefront
A Correspondence with Bioethics Critic, Attorney Wesley J. Smith Read More »
An article in the New Oxford Review illustrates how ” ‘a right to die’ easily becomes ‘a duty to die’ once society labels some lives as not worth living.” Two case histories were briefly outlined. In one instance, Harold Cybulski, visited by his family while in his hospital bed in Ontario, Canada, wakes up from
Slouching Towards a Duty to Die Read More »
