BMJ  2003;327:51-52 (5 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7405.51-b

Letter

Assisted suicide and euthanasia in Switzerland

Doctors occupy special position

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—I agree with Hurst and Mauron that the Swiss penal code illustrates how important it is to separate the issue of whether assisting death should be allowed in some circumstances from that of whether doctors should do it.1 Assistance in dying raises questions that cannot be answered from the perspective of medicine alone.

We should not, however, be misled into denying that doctors inevitably occupy a special position in this issue,2 and not just because the barbiturates used in current practice require a medical prescription (there is a movement aiming to make barbiturates for assistance in suicide exempt from prescription). Central to the issue today, in contrast to the age in which the legislation was drawn up, is that assistance in suicide is discussed almost exclusively in the context of a serious and incurable illness.

This means that the treating doctor is the one to negotiate with the . . . [Full text of this article]

Georg Bosshard, researcher

Institute of Legal Medicine, University of Zurich, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland bosh@irm.unizh.ch


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Relevant Article

Assisted suicide and euthanasia in Switzerland: allowing a role for non-physicians
Samia A Hurst and Alex Mauron
BMJ 2003 326: 271-273. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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