John F. Dedek
Moral Responsibility in Caring {or the Dying
How does a physician co1¡rectly decide who will live and who will be allowed to die?
The physician is not only physician and scientist. He is first of all a man, a man who is also a doctor. And so in the practice of medicine he must make more than medical decisions. He has to make the broader human decisions that are called ethical or moral. He must make a great variety of such decisions. But I want to discuss only two of them. One is the question of care for the dying. What measures ought to be used to keep a person alive? For instance, should a physician prescribe insulin for a terminal cancer patient who develops diabetes? Or must a diabetic patient who develops terminal cancer continue his insulin injections? Should a physician always treat and cure pneumonia in an aged and senile patient? When should a physician turn on or tum off a heart-lung machine, begin or not begin, continue or discontinue artificial respiration, oxygen, intravenous drip, and so on? 227