Editorial
By John Jalsevac
The recent terror attacks on the U.K. presented the world with a cruel irony. Amongst those suspected of masterminding the series of attacks, that, had they been successful, could have killed hundreds of civilians and injured hundreds more, were up to seven respected members of the medical community—physicians, or physicians in training, including a specialist in neurology.
The irony of the situation was brought home most chillingly in a cryptic threat received some months ago by an Anglican cleric who was doing ministry in Iraq: “The people who cure you will kill you.” At the time the cleric ignored the message as just another amongst the countless idle threats from Muslim extremists that he received on a daily basis, unaware of just how literal the words were, how real the threat was.
While the psychology behind using physicians as killers may be as simple as the psychology of disguise—i.e. use those who would least be suspected of such crimes—there may be something at work that is still more subtle.
In response to the disturbing revelations about the U.K. doctors, a recent article in the Toronto Star studied the issue of physician as killer, pointing out that it is hardly a new phenomenon. From Nazi doctors who carried out inhuman experiments on their prisoners, to Jack the Ripper, who some believe may have been a physician, to serial killer Harold Shipman, a doctor who allegedly murdered up to 200 people, physicians have often crossed the line from healer and comforter to murderer or torturer.
As the psychologist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton points out in The Star’s report, doctors have long been perceived as having “shamanistic” powers, and for good reason. The knowledge that physicians have of the human body, of the mechanisms of life, gives them exceptional power over life. But along with this power over life comes the opposing power—of death.
A very long time ago the Greek physician Hippocrates saw the inherent dangers that come with the type of knowledge that the physician acquires. As a consequence he wrote his famous “Hippocratic Oath,” the taking of which was the norm for the medical community for several millennia. Hippocrates’ oath had physicians solemnly swear to the following: “To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death,” and, “Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.”
Presently, however, there is a steady cultural shift in the medical community away from the understanding of the physician as healer, towards an acceptance of the physician also as killer. It may be tempting to immediately think “abortion,” and while that is a true instance of the disturbing trend at work, the problem is deeper than that, and is creeping into every nook and cranny of the medical arts, to their very foundation.
It is no accident that the Hippocratic oath was abandoned by the medical community in the 1970s—an act that has had a devastating effect upon the healthcare professions.
Only yesterday, for instance, LifeSiteNews ran a story about the fact that two nurses have been charged in Oregon for performing an assisted suicide, which seems like a positive story at first glance, at least insofar as the nurses are being charged. But the story is suffused with the same cruel irony found in the story of the U.K. terrorists. For the nurses have come under fire, not because they killed their patient, but because they killed their patient without a physician present.
So far has the pendulum swung in Oregon that the state has codified the role of doctor as killer, legislating that when someone wishes to kill themselves, they may only do so with the help of a physician. To do otherwise is a crime. Death may only come at the hands that were trained to give life.
Again, today we find the story of the Scottish doctor who murdered two prematurely born babies by giving them 23 times the normal dose of a certain drug. Reports say that Dr. Munro will be brought before a fitness to practice panel, and may lose his medical license. Nothing is said in The Scotsman report about the possibility of criminal charges, and meanwhile Munro is arguing that there was nothing wrong with what he did.
A representative from the General Medical Council said that Munro realized that what he had done “was outside accepted professional practice,” but he did not believe that it was “inappropriate.”
Stories like these are multiplying, so that hardly a day goes by when we don’t report on a case where someone who has been trained to save lives, has instead used their knowledge to prematurely end a life.
The Scotsman report on Dr. Munro goes on to discuss the “dilemma” of pain and suffering in the practice of medicine. Essentially the dilemma comes down to the following question: “What is the definition of ‘healing’?”
Here is the root of the problem. After all, if the end of the medical arts is to heal, then one must have a clear understanding of what healing means.
In times past this was an easy question for a physician to answer. The physician was trained to heal the body, and did so, or failed to do so while trying, and that was the end of the story. To preserve life was the governing end of the medical profession. Life was the final good. Of course, it was also the physician’s task to minimize pain and to give comfort to the patient, but never at the expense of life. Physicians considered themselves, and were considered by others, to be part of a sacred vocation, and were treated with a corresponding respect. But nowadays it seems that the question about the true nature of healing has been made much more complicated, if not perverse.
Nowadays it seems that fewer medical professionals understand or accept exactly what “healing” is. For many healing is as it traditionally always was—to take a body that is damaged and try to repair it, and to minimize pain and maximize comfort in the process. But for an increasing number, at certain times to heal is to do the opposite—to destroy the processes of the body, to kill.
According to this way of thinking, sometimes life is better than death, and sometimes death is better than life. But when is one better than the other? This new breed of physician has conveniently changeable answers to the question.
Not only are there no official criteria, but increasingly members of the medical profession are making up looser and looser criteria, pushing the pendulum away from the old understanding of life as always superseding death, towards the notion that often death supersedes life. If you feel life is better than death, then live; if you feel that death is better than life, then die.
Another LifeSiteNews story in the works for tomorrow’s news reports how a respected bioethicist published an article in one of the world’s most prestigious (if not the most prestigious) journal of bioethics, in which the ethicist argues that the mentally ill should be given the “right” to end their own lives. But, then, of course, the bothersome question presents itself: “Who are the mentally ill?” Sufferers of Downs Syndrome, psychopaths, schizophrenics? Or what about the depressed, the stupid, the mildly unhappy?
Absolute standards have been eradicated, and now everything is up for grabs. We have only begun to see the consequences. Increasingly there are reports, not only of doctors assisting in suicides, but of doctors who, according to their own private standards, have decided that a patient no longer merits life. Patients have been killed without their consent, and without the consent of their families. The result, then, is, “if I feel like you should live, then live, and if I feel like you should die, then die.”
For how much longer will we be able to trust our own doctors? When life is no longer the end which the medical profession serves, then how can we be sure we will be cured, and not killed by those in whose hands we are the most vulnerable?
When life becomes only one good being weighed in an arbitrary balance against numerous other goods, then medical professionals have lost their purpose, and will become a danger to everyone. This is precisely the situation in which physicians are increasingly finding themselves today. It is time, therefore, for members of the medical community to recognize the precipitous position in which their profession is hanging, and to begin to push the pendulum back to where it once was—to resurrect the Hippocratic Oath, to understand that to be a physician is to serve life, and never death.
See LifeSiteNews’ Physician’s Oath poster:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/shop/Physicians_Oath.htm