PHYSICIANS IN NEED OF HEALING.(euthanasia)

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly, I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.

excerpt from the Oath of Hippocrates, 5th Century B.C.

For the first time in our tradition there was a complete separation between killing and curing. Throughout the primitive world, the doctor and the sorcerer tended to be the same person. He with the power to kill had power to cure, including specially the undoing of his own killing activities. He who had the power to cure would necessarily also be able to kill. ... [With Hippocrates] the distinction was made clear. One profession, the followers of [Hippocrates], were to be dedicated completely to life under all circumstances, regardless of rank, age or intellectthe life of a slave, the life of the Emperor, the life of a foreign man, the life of a defective child ... .

[T]his is a priceless possession which we cannot afford to tarnish, but society always is attempting to make the physician into a killerto kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient. ... [I]t is the duty of society to protect the physician from such requests.

anthropologist Margaret Mead, quoted by Maurice Levine in Psychiatry and Ethics, pp. 324325, 1972

If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.