RIGHT TO KILL

Hokitika Guardian, 15 July 1935, Page 2

RIGHT TO KILL

DOCTORS AND PATIENTS. WOMAN WHO ASKED TO DIE LONDON, July 10. The doctor’s right to kill was referred to this week at a dinner in London of the Samaritan Free Hospital for Women, by a clergyman who is also a doctor of medicine. He is the Rev. Dr. A. W. Oxford, chairman of the hospital.

I)r Oxford said he never forgets an experience of 30 years ago when he visited a young woman in a poor district who was suffering from cancer. “The woman in her agony appealed to me to kill her,” he said. “I had not the courage to do so, but I did what was the next best, thing. I gave her enough morphia for six nights,, tolling her 1 might not be able' to call in the meantime, and ’ cardully warning her not to take more than one dose at a time or she would surely die. But she did not take an over-dose; she remembered her children.”

In an interview after the dinner. Dr Oxford gave some of his views on the question of ending life in incurable cases of disease. “It is a difficult question,” he said, “1 do not think it should bo in the power of any doctor to end life without some consultation. Such cases, I think, should be investigated by a committee.. In any case, the suggestion should never come from the doctor. It must be at the instigation of the patient, ±

“The woman I attended 30 years ago was about 35 years of age. She was a mother with three children, and they played on the floor while she tossed on the lied in agony. I was with her when she died a short time later. It was a ghastly case. I am 80 years of

age, and this is the first time I have spoken about it to a soul. The recollection is still clearly with mo.” Dr C. Killick Millard, medical officer of Leicester, drafted last year a bill to make euthanasia (easy death) possible, and proposed that the bill should be introduced in the House of Lords. It provided that euthanasia should be entirely voluntary. This plea formed the subject of his presidential address to the Society of Medical Officers of Health.

Sir William Arbuthnot Lane said, in regard to this proposal: “Doctors not infrequently end their lives when .suffering from painful diseases.”, ' ; A The subject of the “right to kill” has been-much discussed recently. The 'following are among the opinions that have been expressed : Dr. Selwyn, Dean of Winchester: “I think no Christian principle would be violated if the doctor thought he would alleviate that person’s pain, even though some risk of life was involved.”

Dishop We lid on : “I would not wholly forbid giving relief in certain circumstances. Painless death must be allowed only in extreme cases of acute illness’ where more than one doctor is agreed that the ease is incurable.”

The Rev. A. Wellesley Orr, Vicar of St. Paul’s Kingston Hill: “So many people have gone out by their own hand when, if they had waited only a tew days longer, there would have been a solution.”