He may be its most recognized practitioner, but Jack Kevorkian did not invent assisted suicide. The practice of assisted suicide is not a modern phenomenon. In ancient Greece, the government gave hemlock to those who wanted it. William Shakespeare...

“Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.” Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) “Euthanasia” is a broad term for mercy killing—taking the life of a hopelessly ill or injured individual in order...

Andrea, an attractive thirty-nine-year-old woman, has been dealing with cancer for five years. She has gone through chemotherapy and radiation, procedures with severe side effects that debilitated her for months and seemed to have aged her by ten years....

On June 26, 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individuals do not have a fundamental, constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. This ruling reversed two previous decisions by U.S. courts of appeals. In the first case, Washington State...

EUTHANASIA COMES FROM two Greek words meaning "good death." When English scholar and statesman Sir Francis Bacon coined the term in the early seventeenth century, he used it to mean the sort of "fair and easy passage from life" that people hoped to...

Euthanasia Euthanasia used to refer to an easy and gentle death, but it has come to refer to methods of inducing that kind of death, or more precisely, methods of bringing about death sooner and usually with less pain and suffering. Euthanasia used to...

Strictly speaking, euthanasia is Greek for "good death," but it has come to be applied to cases of an ill or disabled person being helped to die or deliberately killed by another for the ill or disabled person's benefit. It is thus...

In the Netherlands, euthanasia is understood to mean termination of life by a physician at the request of a patient. It is to be clearly distinguished from withdrawing from treatment when further medical intervention is pointless, allowing nature to...

Euthanasia is the act of either painlessly causing the death or failing to prevent death from occurring from natural causes in an individual with a terminal illness or in an irreversible coma. The term is derived from the Greek words eus (good) and...

Dispensationalism originated in the nineteenth century in the teaching of the Anglican JOHN NELSON DARBY (1800–1882) (see ANGLICANISM). Darby rejected the organized church as apostate, leading him to become part of a separatist group that later...

act or practice of painlessly putting to death persons suffering from painful and incurable disease or incapacitating physical disorder. Because there is no specific provision for it in most legal systems, it is usually regarded as either suicide (if...

Painless killing of a person who has a painful, incurable disease or incapacitating disorder. Most legal systems consider it murder, though in many jurisdictions a physician may lawfully decide not to prolong the patient's life or may give drugs to...

Mercy killing. Judaism teaches that life is a blessing from *God and hastening death is the equivalent of bloodshed. The *Shulhan Arukh teaches that a dying person has the same rights as a living person and ‘it is forbidden to cause him to die...

Euthanasia is the practice of having a medically-assisted death. It is illegal in most countries. Euthanasia is a controversial subject, not only because there are many different moral dilemmas associated with it, but also in what constitutes its...