The founder of the Swiss suicide clinic Dignitas, Ludwig Minelli, has, of course, killed himself. He did it just short of what would have been his 93rd birthday (December 5).
From the Telegraph obituary:
Minelli, who had a macabre habit of describing assisted suicide as a “marvellous opportunity”, saw it as a matter of personal choice and human rights. Properly regulated, he argued, an assisted death could avoid the permanent damage often caused by botched suicides. “The last human right is the right to make a decision on one’s own end,” he told the BBC.
He pushed things further by calling for relations of the terminally ill to be permitted to end their lives, even if in good health. One high-profile Dignitas double suicide was that of the British conductor Sir Edward Downes, who was blind and almost deaf though not terminally ill, and his wife Joan, a former ballet dancer who had terminal cancer, in 2009. Meanwhile, the clinic’s neighbours complained about frequent encounters with body bags in the elevators.
He was a human rights lawyer by trade.
In related news, when the University of Michigan medical school alumni magazine “looked for clinicians and researchers who made positive contributions to U-M, to medicine in general, to their chosen field, or to their communities,” one of their tributes was to Jack Kevorkian. He was the convicted murderer we came to know as Dr. Death. Beyond that, in a piece responding to the abysmal choice, Dr. Kristin M. Collier (a clinical associate professor of internal medicine) and Scott Lyons (an associate professor of English) point out this fact I had long forgotten:
He was expelled from Michigan’s residency program after submitting a proposal suggesting that death-row prison inmates should be used as the subjects of fatal medical experiments while they were still alive.
They write:
There are two issues here: public institutional memory and physician-assisted suicide. On the first issue, we see no real difference between celebrating Kevorkian and honoring, say, another murderous University of Michigan alum: “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski who, between 1978 and 1995, orchestrated a mail-bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23. Kaczynski killed himself in prison in 2023. Medicine at Michigan thinks Kevorkian’s reputation merits reappraisal because physician-assisted suicide “has become more accepted,” but the Unabomber’s anti-technology and pro-political violence views have become more acceptable too. Should we now expect to see Kaczynski similarly hailed?
. . . Kevorkian’s legacy at the University is important because public institutional memories articulate institutional values. Celebrating Kevorkian would suggest that the medical school is in favor of suicide. That would be a grave moral error.
And they point out what apparently cannot be said enough:
Seriously ill patients deserve our utmost compassion and care, and we must do all we can to provide compassionate, symptom-relieving, end-of-life palliative care, including hospice and enhanced caregiver support. A just society would be one whose foundation rests on laws protecting people from coercion, experimental drugs and social pressures to die. It is precisely for reasons like these that the American Medical Association clearly states that physician-assisted suicide “is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.”
There is not dignity in suicide. Ever. How about we stop making people feel like burdens? And how about we stop tolerating the idea that suicide is sometimes the ultimate exercise of freedom. Our suicide-prevention programs are worthless if we are promoting a neater-packaged suicide at the same time. We need consistency in cherishing life. Especially from our doctors and human-rights lawyers.