Editor s Letter

Doctor's Dilemma

Is there a right to die? It is not one that obsesses most of us most of the time, but it does not need a particularly morbid imagination to conceive circumstances in which it might be the most important right of one's life. Most people would understand the suicide of a person terminally ill, with nothing but pain ahead. The practical reality, however, is that in twenty-six states the right to die is severely circumscribed. The full force of the law is brought against anyone who aids a suicide, however desperate the individual may be. It makes no difference whether the assistance is provided by a loving amateur or a discriminating physician. This is the doctor's dilemma, and always has been. But now it has inescapably become society's dilemma, too, because of the celebrated case of Dr. Jack Kevorkian of Michigan and his homemade suicide machine (page 146). It was Kevorkian's spooky Rube Goldberg contraption, rigged up in the back of his VW van, that enabled Janet Adkins, an Alzheimer's victim, to dispatch herself into the Big Sleep she craved.

Ron Rosenbaum went to the trial in Pontiac, where the people of the state of Michigan sought a court order to prevent Dr. Kevorkian from ever doing again in Michigan what he had done for Janet Adkins. The Thanatron, or "Mercy Machine," as Dr. Kevorkian likes to call his lethal hardware, got all the headlines, but the trial plumbed deeper issues than the character and motives of a controversial medic. Is medically assisted suicide a step on the road to Nazi euthanasia? Could indigent and uninsured patients in state-supported hospitals, or even costly death-row inmates, become the most desirable subjects for "self-deliverance"? Would patient trust in a doctor be eroded if suicide were a possible prognosis? Rosenbaum powerfully reports the conflicting testimony, but most readers will carry away the haunting voices of the desperately ill who came forward. They see Kevorkian not as a defendant but as an angel of mercy.

Editor in chief