Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on July 7, 2007
Social History of Medicine 2007 20(2):205-221; doi:10.1093/shm/hkm034
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Active Euthanasia in Pre-Modern Society, 1500–1800: Learned Debates and Popular Practices
* University of Würzburg, Institute for the History of Medicine, Oberer Neubergweg 10a, 97074 Würzburg, Germany. E-mail: Michael.Stolberg{at}mail.uni-wuerzburg.de
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Abstract |
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Historians of medical ethics have found that active euthanasia, in the sense of intentionally hastening the death of terminally-ill patients, was considered unacceptable in the Christian West before the 1870s. This paper presents a range of early modern texts on the issue which reflect a learned awareness of practices designed to shorten the lives of dying patients which were widely accepted among the lay public. Depriving the dying abruptly of their head-rest or placing them flat on the cold floor may strike us as merely symbolic today, but early moderns associated such measures with very concrete and immediate effects. In this sense, the intentional hastening of death in agonising patients had an accepted place in pre-modern popular culture. These practices must, however, be put into their proper context. Death was perceived more as a transition to the after-life and contemporary notions of dying could make even outright suffocation appear as an act of compassion which merely helped the soul depart from the body at the divinely ordained hour of death. The paper concludes with a brief comparison of early modern arguments with those of today.
Keywords: history of euthanasia; dying; death; popular customs; Hippocratic Oath