Medical matters

Remind me never to go near a doctor again as long as I live...


This from Uncle Di on the new medical ethics (what Diogenes does not mention, is that Servatius was also a doctor. He knew all about the new ethics):

"The trial of Adolf Eichmann, from Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Robert Servatius was Eichmann's defense attorney (emphasis original):


The moment, one of the few great ones in the whole trial, occurred during the short oral plaidoyer of the defense, after which the court withdrew for four months to write its judgment. Servatius declared the accused innocent of charges bearing on his responsibility for "the collection of skeletons, sterilizations, killings by gas, and similar medical matters," whereupon Judge Halevi interrupted him: "Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter." To which Servatius replied: "It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing too is a medical matter."

Anyone who wants to know what is happening in hospital bioethics committees these days, (yes, the Catholic ones too) needs only to read two books, Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Singer's Practical Ethics.