The deliberate medical hastening of death was first proposed as a public policy in the late nineteenth-century, long before the technical advances now commonly associated with it. In his forthcoming book on the history of euthanasia in the United States (Princeton University Press), Dr. Shai Lavi of the TAU Law Faculty explores how euthanasia emerged as a conceivable modern way of dying. This history mirrors a radical transformation in the way we die, in which care of the dying moved from the domain of religion, through medicine, to the jurisdiction of law and public policy. Following the work of the French historian Michel Foucault and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he sees this progression as yet another aspect of the rise of technique, and the decline of art, in our modern world.
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| Shy Abady, Untitled, 1995 mixed technique on wood |
Following the rise of the Protestant ethic, dying lost its character as a moment of transition between this world and the world-to-come. Rather, holy dying became, in early nineteenth-century America, an art of holy living culminating in the last hours of life. The priest's position as a minister of salvation at the deathbed was taken over by the physician's position as a minister of medical hope. The physician, who had the duty to care for the dying patient but who often lacked the means to do so, turned to euthanasia to overcome the patient's hopeless suffering.
In the late nineteenth-century, in order to prevent the medical profession from abusing its power, positive law, in the form of state law, assumed the role of regulating medical euthanasia. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, euthanasia came to be seen as an instrument by which the State could manage its biological resources, extending its reach beyond the dying to the physically disabled and mentally handicapped. The routinization of medically-hastened death - the transformation of dying from art to technique - reached a high point when "lethal dosing" (the administration of sedatives to relieve pain with the well-known outcome of hastening death) became widely practiced. It was not even considered as taking life.
The study concludes by suggesting that euthanasia is only one instance of the now prevalent medicalization, legalization and bureaucratization of dying. The attempts to find simple solutions to the current crisis in dying, such as by legally regulating the treatment of the dying patient, ignore the most fundamental aspect of the problem, namely, the deep and radical transformation in the cultural understanding of death. Attempts to overcome the modern crisis in facing death by different forms of regulation is, in the long run, more likely to enhance the sense of crisis than to resolve it.
