https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1374l0/what_have_been_the_prevailing_attitudes_of/
created by drinka40tonight on 14/11/2012 at 20:04 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 top-level comments (showing 0)
I've come across claims that essentially say that, in the history of medicine (and here I don't just mean modern medicine), doctors have very rarely seen participating in euthanasia as part of their profession. How accurate is this?
To be clear, I imagine there are examples of doctors "easing a patient's suffering" by doping them with laudanum or whatever to ease their passing. But these cases are at best a sort of passive-euthanasia. What I'm interested in is a more "active" euthanasia, where doctors take steps to produce death in a patient, perhaps because the patient wants to die, or to end a patient's non-terminal suffering, or even for some cultural reason, like, "deformed people shouldn't live." So, I'm looking for cases where a patient could go on living, but is instead killed by the doctor. (And to narrow the focus even more, I'm not looking for sort of general cultural practices of killing people (like, leaving babies out in the cold, or human sacrifice; I want to focus just on doctors actively euthanizing people)
So are there good examples of this? Have there been certain places/times in which the role of doctor included actively ending a person's life (and not just making it easier for the person to die)?
There's nothing here!