Euthanasia

“ Euthanasia entered the prison-chamber, awe-stricken and trembling; for the good ever feel humiliated at the sight of misfortune in others: the poor prisoner was seated crouched in a corner; she looked wildly towards the door; and, seeing Euthanasia, she leaped up, and, throwing herself at her feet, clinging to her knees, and clasping them with convulsive strength, she cried, "Save me! You alone on earth can save me."
Poor Euthanasia was moved to tears ”

“ Euthanasia, you are much deceived; you either worship a useless shadow, or a fiend in the clothing of a god. Listen to me, while I announce to you the eternal and victorious influence of evil, which circulates like air about us, clinging to our flesh like a poisonous garment, eating into us, and destroying us. ”

“ To poison the spring of life is as real a tampering with the sacredness of life as it is to check its course. The nurse is really committing a slow euthanasia. Either the patient or the nurse must commit an heroic suicide for the sake of the other—which shall it be? Shall the life be sacrificed, which is torture to its possessor, useless to society, and whose bounds are already clearly marked? or shall a strong and healthy life, with all its future possibilities, be undermined and sacrificed in addition to that which is already doomed? ”

“ Euthanasia wept; like a child she wept,—but there was none near to whom she could tell the complicated sensations that overpowered her: to speak to those we love in such moments, exhilarates the spirits; else the deep feeling preys on the heart itself. ”

“ At first the pilgrim gazed for a moment on the golden hair and bluest eyes of Euthanasia, her heavenly smile, and clear brow; and then she said: "You are the lady of this castle? You are named Euthanasia?"
"Most true: and might I in return ask you who you are, who wander alone and unhappy? Believe me I should think myself very fortunate, if you would permit me to know your grief, and to undertake the task of consoling you. If you mourn for your faults, does not a moment of real repentance annihilate them all? ”

“ I do not ask you to love me, you cannot;—but you are still young, very young, Euthanasia; and fortune yet may have many changes in store for you. Remember, that, through them all, I am your friend; and if ever in any misery you want a protector, one to save and preserve you, Castruccio, the neglected, mistaken, but most faithful Castruccio, will ever be ready to use his arm and his power in your service. Now, Euthanasia, farewel." "Oh God!" cried the unhappy girl, moved to her inmost heart, "could you not have spared me this? ”

“ Euthanasia smiled at the fancy of one so uncouth in manners and habits of life; and she replied,—"Who knows how soon it may be my destiny to see that other side, which you imagine outdoes this sublime spectacle in splendour?"
"Heaven preserve you long upon earth," replied the man; "and make you as happy as you deserve, as happy as you have made others!" ”

“ Yet then I did not escape; his boiling and hideous passions, turned to revenge, now endeavoured to wreak themselves in my misery. These limbs, my Euthanasia, have been wrenched in tortures; cold, famine and thirst have kept like blood-hounds a perpetual watch upon my wearied life ”

“ In the admirable liturgy of the churches of England and of Rome, there is a fervent prayer for protection against “battle, murder, and sudden death.” From death uncontemplated, unarranged, unprepared for, may Heaven in mercy deliver us! But if ever ready, as we should be for the inevitable event, the most kindly mode of infliction must surely be that which is most prompt and brief. To die unconsciously, as in sleep, or by apoplexy, or lightning, or overwhelming violence, as in the catastrophe of the Princeton, this is the true Euthanasia. ”

“ Look, dear Euthanasia, daylight has made dim the glimmer of your lamp, and bids me remember how often I have forgotten my promise to be brief in my relation; it is now almost finished. I soon greatly loved my kind guardian; he was the gentlest and most amiable of mortals, wise as a Grecian sage, fearless and independent. He died in torture: the bloodhounds hunted him from his den; they bound his aged limbs ”

“ Euthanasia wept when she heard of the blood that had been spilt for her; and self-reproach, who is ever ready to thrust in his sharp sting, if he find that mailed conscience has one weak part, now tormented her that she had not yielded, before one human life had been lost in so unhappy a cause. "Do not evil that good may come," thought she. ”

“ We have seen that we have a right to shorten life in obedience to a call of duty, and it will at once be said that the nurse is obeying such a call. But has the nurse a right to sacrifice her own life—and an injury to health is a sacrifice of life—for an obviously unequivalent advantage? We are apt to forget, because the injury is partially veiled to us, that we touch the sacredness of life whenever we touch health: every case of over-work, of over-strain, of over-exertion, is, so to speak, a modified case of euthanasia. ”

“ We ask, then, for the legalisation of euthanasia, because it is in accordance with the highest morality yet known, that which teaches the duty of self sacrifice for the greater good of others, because it is sanctioned in principle by every service performed at personal danger and injury, and because-it is already partially practised by modern improvements in medical science. ”

“ I have observed, as a matter of fact, that it is only people who exceed the age of ninety who attain euthanasia,—who die, that is to say, of no disease, apoplexy or convulsion, and pass away without agony of any sort; nay, who sometimes even show no pallor, but expire generally in a sitting attitude, and often after a meal,—or, I may say, simply cease to live rather than die. To come to one's end before the age of ninety, means to die of disease, in other words, prematurely. ”

“ It is, sometimes, thoughtlessly stated that the supporters of euthanasia propose to put to death all persons suffering from incurable disorders; no assertion can be more inaccurate or more calculated to mislead. ”

“ So the patient had to linger on in almost unimaginable torture, knowing that the pain could only end in death, seeing her relatives worn out by watching, and agonised at the sight of her sufferings, and yet compelled to live on from hour to hour, till at last the anguish culminated in death. Is it possible for any one to believe that it would have been wrong to have hastened the inevitable end, and thus to have shortened the agony of the sufferer herself, and to have also-spared her nurses months of subsequent ill-health. It is in such cases as this that euthanasia would be useful. ”

“ Death from old age, from natural decay—usually spoken of as death without disease—is most improperly termed by writers an euthanasia. Alas! how far otherwise is the truth! Old age itself is, with the rarest exceptions, exceptions which I have never had the good fortune to meet with anywhere—old age itself is a protracted and terrible disease. ”

“ We shall succeed; but death will be among us; and tomorrow many a child will lose its father, and many a wife her husband, fighting for this heap of stones which can feel neither defeat nor triumph. I will be among them; fear not, St. Martin has declared for us."
There are moments in our lives, when the chance-word of a madman or a fool is sufficient to cause our misery; and such was the present state of Euthanasia's mind. ”

“ People who have taken out a Euthanasia policy don’t want Tom, Dick and Harry to know—more particularly, they don’t want Miles Bredon to know—that they have committed suicide. They have the habit, as I know from experience, of trying to put up a little problem in detection for me, the brutes! ”

“ It could scarcely transpire otherwise than that "euthanasia" should replace care of the chronic sick and indigent aged; that infanticide should be in a large category of circumstances encouraged, and in some compelled; that suicide should offer a rational escape from all serious ills, leaving a door ever hospitably ajar to receive the body bankrupt in its capacity for sensual enjoyment, the only enjoyment henceforth worthy of the name. ”

“ It first became the expression for the attempt of the physician—originating in human compassion, developed by medical science—to alleviate the end of a dying person by soothing his pain. But then the meaning of the word, and with it the concept of euthanasia, was expanded, and towards the end of the 19th century it meant assistance in dying through an abbreviation of life if the life of the suffering person had lost its value in view of immediate and painful death, or as a result of an incurable disease. ”

“ Others have sustained their fate with fortitude; and let faith and submission to the will of heaven be to us, instead of that dauntless spirit of inbred virtue that supported the heroes of antiquity."
Euthanasia raised her own spirits as she spoke; and fearless expectation, and something like triumph, illuminated her countenance, as she cast her eyes upward, and with her hand clasped that of her friend. ”

“ No placid euthanasia shall silently lead on the dissolution of the natural world. But the trumpet shall sound—the struggle shall come—this goodly frame of things shall be rent and crushed by the arm of its omnipotent Maker. ”

“ The last sentence of the extract is specially important; in discussing the morality of euthanasia we are not discussing the moral lawfulness or unlawfulness of suicide in general; we may protest against suicide, and yet uphold euthanasia, and we may even protest against the one and uphold the other, on exactly the same principle, as we shall see further on. As the greater includes the less, those who consider that a man has a right to choose whether he will live or not, and who therefore regard all suicide as lawful, will, of course, approve of euthanasia ”

“ Charlotte began, earnestly.
But her husband interrupted her. "No condolences are due, dear. He gave a dying man the most merciful sort of euthanasia, and at the same time demonstrated a new method as daring as it was triumphant. With a case taken a month earlier it would have saved a life. The demonstration is a contribution to science. If he received no applause it was because we don't applaud in the presence of death, but there was not a man there who didn't realize that in certain lines the country surgeon could give them a long handicap and still win." ”

“ Voluntary and involuntary euthanasia may result once doctors are authorized to prescribe lethal medication in the first instance, for they might find it pointless to distinguish between patients who administer their own fatal drugs and those who wish not to, and their compassion for those who suffer may obscure the distinction between those who ask for death and those who may be unable to request it. ”

“ But lest the devils should, with their usual pharisaic inhumanity, make their refined methods of torture take the place of euthanasia, he gave me a small nutful of a most potent drug, a pinch of which, small enough to be hidden under the nails, would launch me in a few seconds into the tide of unconsciousness that leads to death. ”

“ When we talk about euthanasia, then, it would be well to ask some of these old people whether they want it or not. Seldom will the answer be found to be that which is so often presumed, by those in good health and strength, to be inevitable under such conditions. ”

“ I know that no creature in the whole world is so miserable as I; but I have not yet drained the cup of life; something still remains to be done.
"Yet one word, my Euthanasia, of Him who is the law of my life; and yet I dare not say what 1 thought of saying. You write to him about me sometimes; do you not? You may still; I would not check you in this. In truth he is the master of my fate; and it were well that he knew all that relates to me."
Poor Beatrice then wept bitterly; but she waved her hand in sign that she would be left alone; and Euthanasia retired. ”

“ So long as life has some sweetness left in it, so long the offered mercy is not needed; euthanasia is a relief from unendurable agony, not an enforced extinguisher of a still desired existence. Besides, no one proposes to make it obligatory on anybody; it is only urged that where the patient asks for the mercy of a speedy death, instead of a protracted one, his prayer may be granted without any danger of the penalties of murder or manslaughter being inflicted on the doctors and nurses in attendance. ”

“ It is, however, probable that all will agree that the benefit conferred by the legalisation of euthanasia would, in many instances, be very great; but many feel that the objections to it, on moral grounds, are so weighty, that no physical benefit could countervail the moral wrong. ”

“ The Lancet, discussing a recent proposal that murderers should be narcotised to death in a lethal chamber, says:— "First and foremost is the question whether it is advisable to give to murderers, and to them alone, the privilege of being deprived of life by absolute euthanasia. ”

“ Ten times in my own observation I remember witnessing, with attentive mind, these phenomena of natural euthanasia. Without pain, anger, or sorrow, the intellectual faculties of the fated man lose their brightness. Ambition ceases or sinks into desire for repose. Ideas of time, of space, of duty, lingeringly pass away. To sleep and not to dream is the pressing, and, step by step, still pressing need ”

“ EXTRACT FROM THE AFFIDAVIT OF DEFENDANT BRACK, 14 OCTOBER 1946, DESCRIBING ADMINISTRATIVE DETAILS AND PROCEDURE OF THE EUTHANASIA PROGRAM The Euthanasia Program
4. The Euthanasia Program was initiated in the summer of 1939. Hitler issued a secret order to Professor Dr. Karl Brandt, Reich Commissioner for Medical and Health Matters, and at that time personal physician to the Fuehrer, and to Philipp Bouhler, charging them with responsibility for the killing of human beings who were unable to live, that is, the according of a mercy death to incurably insane persons. ”