Perrone, J. A.

English

epublications@Marquette

The Linacre QuarterlyVolume 34 | Number 4 Article 6November 1967Right to LiveJ. A. PerroneFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnqRecommended CitationPerrone, J. A. (1967) "Right to Live," The Linacre Quarterly: Vol. 34 : No. 4 , Article 6.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnq/vol34/iss4/6The Right to Live J. A. PERRONE, M.D. When a patient wants ' to be kept alive as long as possible notwith-standing his suffering, this is .his right, and the doctor must use his skill to comply; When the patient would have nature take its course and only extraordinary means will keep him alive, he may refuse such means; this also is his right. Here the responsibility and authority of the physician ends. The physician cannot and should not take it upon himself to be the executioner. The right to life is God-given. and any-thing which affects this right must follow His laws. There is an anti-God philosophy in the world today which is also anti-human. It is thinking which, if accepted, would impede medical science and turn us backward to-ward barbarianism. It would de-stroy our profession, wipe out all we have accomplished in the past and prevent any progress in the future. It is a philosophy which would make us enemies, instead of friends, of mankind, recommending the in-fliction of death on a person judged to be suffering from a painful and incurable disease. The advocates of this philosophy have found a delicate name for it. They call it euthanasia. We who prefer truth are not deceived nor does the name conceal the ugliness of the deed. Euthanasia is murder. We know that it is wrong because it is forbidden· by God; because it is an insult to the Creator; because 334 we, who cannot give life, h: the right to take it away. :~ quite evident to us, because with the eyes of faith, and with the eyes of faith, we s the eyes of God. However, there are those tr · it is not clear. There are the do not have the faith. T h those whose understanding is human. What shall we them? We shall ask them or tion: "What would be the medicine if euthanasia had L cepted in the past?" And wi question, their whole struc falsehood crumbles. : not s all ·2 see ::eing with :hom who ~ are erely y to ues-lte of ·n ac-1 that .re of They say that they are h mani-tarians. They are not. Their ,hilos-ophy is anti-humanitarian . Even from a purely humanitarian ~ tand­point, it is false. For if eu t~ .m asia were to be accepted now, there would be few real advar :es in medicine. And if it had been <1 dopted a thousand years ago, or fiv thou-sand years ago, there woul · be no medical science worthy of th e name today. To understand this thon.mghly, we must fix firmly in our minds what euthanasia is. It is scientific murder. It is the suicide of medical science. It is the complete perversion of everything that medicine means. It would turn our profession wrong side out and set it to· destroying it-self. Rather than healers, we would be killers. Rather than life-bearers, we should become merchants of LINACRE Q UARTERLY death. Rather than saviors, de-stroyers. No longer harbingers of hope, we would be counsellors of despair. The thing is so abominable that the normal mind shrinks from plumbing its ugly depths. It would take the very means which we have developed for saving lives and dis-tort them to the service of death. Your prophet of euthanasia will pose as the friend of man. He will tell you that he speaks only of ex-treme cases. He will appeal to sen-timentality, assuring you that his purpose is to relieve suffering, that his vile philosophy would become operative only in hopeless cases. Those of us who seriously consider the term are well aware of how far "hopeless" could be extended. Even humanly speaking, it is wrong. We who have dedicated our lives to the conquest of disease ad-mit no case to be hopeless. The white flag of surrender is no part of our equipment. And it is precisely because of this - because through the ages we have fought the good fight against hopeless odds that we have conquered. Everything that we have accomplished ... everything We can do to relieve pain . . . all that we know about healing has resulted from this one fact, that we have never lost hope. We have never surrendered. We have never cast down our weapons of mercy and shown the white feather of cowardice. Suppose we had! Sup-~ that the great men of the past, Instead of fighting every inch of NovEMBER the way against every disease threatening mankind had yielded to the ugly whisper .that it is useless? What if Galen and Paracelsus and Harvey had been infected and paralyzed by this lie? Or Pasteur, or Lister, or Robert Koch, or Walter Reed? Or all the others whose splen-did names shine like stars in the flag that has often been tattered, but never lowered? What if Jenner had believed that his mission in life was not to cure hopeless ailments, but to destroy his victims? Not more than eighty years ago, James Simpson estimated that Jenner's vaccination had saved more lives than the Napolenic wars had taken - some five or six millions. How many lives would Jenner have saved had he adopted the cowardly device of euthanasia and, like Pilate, washed his hands in the blood of patients? To come closer home, what could we say to anguished parents today, had Chevalier Jackson shrugged his shoulders hopelessly and, instead of developing bronchoscopy, advised euthanasia for children in whose lungs foreign objects had lodged? Examples might be multiplied endlessly. Not long ago, diabetes was a "hopeless" affliction. Then came Banting - and insulin. Dip-theria was the scourge of childhood - until conquered by Behring, Ki ti-sato, Schick, and Park. Only recently pneumonia has begun to yield to antibiotics. Because medical men would not cry "Quits!" typhoid, cholera, bubonic plague, smallpox 335 . . ' I ~ J~ I .. and a host of other "hopeless" dis-eases have been hrough t under control. The world has recently been ravaged by the most terrible of wars. On every battlefront, doctors a nd nurses labored night and day to relieve suffering and to heal· the wounded. Because of them, how many sons returned to their . mothers? How many fathers to their children? How many husbands to their wives? We know not. But be-cause we have turned a deaf ear to the prophets of despair, we can lift up our hearts and reply that none will die who, with the help of God, can be saved. 336 The history of medicine ; with the names of brave n women who have fough t f( kind and won - because the give no quarter to death heed to the philosophies We are all enlisted in t sade. We go with God into 1 of the battle. From time to hear of new "miracles" of science. And we rememb there are no "miracles" witL help of God. Jright 1 and man-,vould 1d no :loom. , cru-thick 1e we 2dical that 1t the Dr. Perrone is Chief of the Depa1 1ent of Laryngology and Bronchology, M<· y Hos· pital, Pittsburgh, Penna. LINACRE Q uARTERLY 

Right to Live

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3081&amp;context=lnq

Right to Live

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

epublications@Marquette