The Right to Kill (Cont'd)

Last week the Press and medical world continued to be exercised over the issue of physicians' right to bring merciful death to defective newborns and suffering incurables (TIME, Nov. 18 & 25).

P: In Bridgeport, Conn., Dr. Myron Anson Warriner, 79, went back 48 years to recall the autumn day when as a young North Brookfield, Mass, practitioner three years out of Harvard Medical School, he was called to attend a sturdy French huntsman named LeTourneau who had accidentally blown off his face with a shotgun. The man's family and another physician, an old Army man, agreed with the young doctor on the best thing to do. Dr. Warriner gave the mangled huntsman a fatal dose of morphine.

"I have never had anv reason to doubt," declared the kindly oldster, whose patients refused to let him retire five years ago, "that I acted justly." He believes, furthermore, that the entire medical profession is now readier to condone such "mercy killings" than it was in 1887. "Fifty years have brought a lot of changes in attitudes of thought," said he.

Half vexed, half amused was old Dr. Warriner when the Law and LeTourneau's family promptly uprose to challenge his bold confession. In North Brookfield the dead man's two spinster daughters, aged 54 and 52, declared that their father had died of loss of blood, that he had been attended not by Dr. Warriner but by the Army man whom he had mentioned as his consultant. In Worcester, undeterred by the impossibility of producing a corpus delicti, a district attorney sped a State detective to North Brookfield to investigate the 48-year-old death. The detective shortly announced that there was nothing to substantiate Dr. Warriner's claim that he had deliberately done away with Le Tourneau. Snapped Oldster Warriner: "There were four physicians in [North] Brookfield at the time. The others are dead. I am alive. Therefore all others who were acquainted with the case cannot corroborate my story."

P: In small Friedensburg. Pa. Dr. Monroe F. Clouser, 52, was summoned to the telephone by a Reading Eagle reporter, asked if he had ever heard of any "mercy killings" performed by Berks County physicians. On the basis of the ensuing interview United Press and Associated Press broadcast the news that Dr. Clouser admitted having put six sufferers to death by overdoses of opiates. In addition to quoting him in detail as to cases, the dispatches reported Dr. Clouser as saying: "Lots of other doctors do the same thing, but they're afraid to admit it."

When Mrs. Clouser saw the stories about her husband, she blew up. Next day press association wires clicked out a statement by Dr. Clouser that he had been "misquoted." His denial: "I never gave an overdose of any drug and I never willingly did anything in my power to hasten death for any sick person, regardless of his condition or wishes."

P: In Oak Park, Ill. the mother of Patricia Maguire, famed sleeping sickness victim who has been in a coma since February 1932 (TIME, April 15 et ante), announced: "Never would I want them to bring death to my Pat. I would be tempted to kill anyone who hinted that I'd want them to do anything to my girl."

P: In Chicago, Director William Creighton Woodward of the American Medical Association's Bureau of Legal Medicine & Legislation offered an official opinion on the subject: "The doctor who deliberately causes death prematurely, even for the purpose of relieving a patient of suffering, is guilty of manslaughter or murder. Whether the law should legalize the causing of premature death . . . is a matter for legislative determination. . . . Legislation of this character would certainly call for the appointment of an official board to pass on applications for permission to be killed. The medical profession . . . is hardly called on to pass on the inherent social, economic and political considerations and to judge the situation as a whole."

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