Euthanasia or Physician-Assisted Suicide: Attitudes of European Physicians

• Authors: Alessandro Gatti , Ramiro Délio Borges Meneses

Abstracts

EN

The Hippocratic Oath strictly prohibits the administration of lethal medication and assisting someone in killing him or herself. A significant number of people, however, have felt that this strict prohibition is no longer tenable. They are of the opinion that, in some cases, medicine should help a patient to die peacefully, rather than prolong unbearable and pointless suffering. After discussions of euthanasia had been going on in Europe and the U.S. for more than a century, euthanasia was legalized in two countries, Belgium and the Netherlands, in 2002. At present, there also exist legally sanctioned possibilities for assisted suicide in- besides the Netherlands-Switzerland and Oregon. All these developments have generated an enormous amount of literature on the subject of euthanasia. Given the huge quantity of recent articles on the attitudes of physicians towards euthanasia, a review seemed relevant.

Keywords

EN

euthanasia; physician-sssisted suicide; ethics; medicine

• Publisher: Instytut Studiów Międzynarodowych i Edukacji Humanum
• Journal: Prosopon. Europejskie Studia Społeczno-Humanistyczne
• Year: 2016
• Issue: 1(14)
• Pages: 65-76

Dates

published

2016

Contributors

author

Alessandro Gatti

author

Ramiro Délio Borges Meneses

Identifiers

Biblioteka Nauki

2158830