Medicine's Alarming Ethic of Preserving Life at All Costs

An anonymous article in the January 1957 Atlantic Monthly captures then emerging alarm over medicine's ethic of preserving life at all costs.



"There is a new way of dying today.  It is the slow passage via modern medicine.  if you are very will modern medicine can save you.  If you are going to die, it can prevent you from doing so for a very long time."



A 1957 editorial in the New England of Medicine said this article should be "required reading for physicians."  It warned of "an approaching specter that looks almost as ghoulish and quite as menacing as euthanasia itself." 256(16):760.

(Hat Tip:  Gary Belkin, Death Before Dying)