I am a broken piece of machinery. I am ready.
− Last words of Woodrow Wilson, Jan. 31,1924
George Zygmaniak, 26, lacked the former President's rhetorical skills, but as he lay in a hospital bed last month in Neptune, N.J., paralyzed from the neck down because of a motorcycle accident, he felt that he was a broken piece of machinery.
He was ready to go. He begged his brother Lester, 23, to kill him. According to police, Lester complied−using a sawed-off shotgun at close range. Lester, who had enjoyed an unusually close relationship with his brother, has been charged with first-degree murder.
Last December Eugene Bauer, 59, was admitted to Nassau County Medical Center on Long Island with cancer of the throat. Five days later he was in a coma and given only two days to live. Then, charges the district attorney, Dr. Vincent A. Montemarano, 33, injected an overdose of potassium chloride into Bauer's veins. Bauer died within five minutes. Montemarano listed the cause of death as cancer, but prosecutors now say that it was a "mercy killing" and have accused the doctor of murder.
The two cases underscore the growing emotional controversy over euthanasia ("mercy killing") and the so-called right to die−that is, the right to slip from life with a minimum of pain for both the patient and his family. No one seriously advocates the impulsive taking of life, as in the Zygmaniak shooting. A person suddenly crippled, no matter how severely, may yet show unpredictable improvement or regain at least a will to live. Whether or not to speed the passage of a fatally ill patient is a far subtler question. The headlong advances of medical science make the issue constantly more complex for patients and their families, for doctors and hospitals, for theologians and lawyers.
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The doctor's dilemma−how long to prolong life after all hope of recovery has gone−has some of its roots in half-legendary events of 2,400 years ago. When Hippocrates, the "Father of Medicine," sat under his giant plane tree on the Aegean island of Kos, euthanasia (from the Greek meaning "a good death") was widely practiced and took many different forms. But from beneath that plane tree came words that have been immortalized in the physician's Hippocratic oath, part of which reads: "I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody, if asked for, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect."
Down the centuries, this has been interpreted by most physicians to mean that they must not give a patient a fatal overdose, no matter how terrible his pain or how hopeless his prospects. Today many scholars contend that the origin of this item in the oath has been misinterpreted. Most likely it was designed to keep the physician from becoming an accomplice of palace poisoners or of a man seeking to get rid of a wife.
The most emphatic opponents of euthanasia have been clergymen, of nearly all denominations. Churchmen protest that if a doctor decides when a patient is to die, he is playing God. Many physicians still share this objection. However much they may enjoy a secret feeling of divinity when dispensing miraculous cures, to play the angel of death is understandably repugnant. Moreover, as psychoanalysts point out, they are chillingly reminded of their own mortality.