Benjamin Ward Richardson, M.D.
[Dr. Richardson was an English physician of uncommon originality and ability. He founded and for some years edited the Journal of Public Health, chiefly directed toward the prevention of disease. In 1875 he created widespread interest by sketching an imaginary “Model City of Health” to be called Hygeia. He wrote several important books; from “The Diseases of Modern Life,” published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, are taken the extracts which follow.]
By the strict law of Nature a man should die as unconscious of his death as of his birth.
Subjected at birth to what would be, in the after-conscious state, an ordeal to which the most cruel of deaths were not possibly more severe, he sleeps through the process, and only upon the subsequent awakening feels the impressions, painful or pleasant, of the world into which he is delivered. In this instance the perfect law is fulfilled because the carrying of it out is retained by Nature herself: human free-will and the caprice that springs from it have no influence.
By the hand of Nature death were equally a painless portion. The cycle of life completed, the living being sleeps into death when Nature has her way.
This purely painless process, this descent by oblivious trance into oblivion, this natural physical death, is the true Euthanasia; and it is the duty of those we call physicians to secure for man such good health as shall bear him in activity and happiness onward in his course to this goal. For Euthanasia, though it be open to every one born of every race, is not to be had by any save through obedience to those laws which it is the mission of the physician to learn, to teach, and to enforce. Euthanasia is the sequel of health, the happy death engrafted on the perfect life.
When the physician has taught the world how this benign process of Nature may be secured, and the world has accepted the lesson, death itself will be practically banished; it will be divested equally of fear, of sorrow, of suffering. It will come as a sleep.
If you ask me what proof there is of the possibility of such a consummation, I point to our knowledge of the natural phenomena of one form of dissolution revealed to us even now in perfect, though exceptional, illustration. We have all seen Nature, in rare instances, vindicating herself despite the social opposition to her, and showing how tenderly, how soothingly, how like a mother with her foot on the cradle, she would, if she were permitted, rock us all gently out of the world. How, if the free-will with which she has armed us were brought into accord with her designs, she would give us the riches, the beauties, the wonders of the Universe for our portion so long as we could receive and enjoy them; and at last would gently withdraw us from them, sense by sense, with such imperception that the pain of the withdrawal would be unfelt and indeed unknown. Ten times in my own observation I remember witnessing, with attentive mind, these phenomena of natural Euthanasia. Without pain, anger, or sorrow, the intellectual faculties of the fated man lose their brightness. Ambition ceases, or sinks into desire for repose. Idea of time, of space, of duty, lingeringly pass away. To sleep and not to dream is the pressing and, step by step, still pressing need; until at length it whiles away nearly all the hours. The awakenings are shorter and shorter; painless, careless, happy awakenings to the hum of a busy world, to the merry sounds of children at play, to the sound of voices offering aid; to the effort of talking on simple topics and recalling events that have dwelt longest on the memory; and then again the overpowering sleep. Thus on and on, until at length, the intellectual nature lost, the instinctive and merely animal functions, now no longer required to sustain the higher faculties, in their turn succumb and fall into inertia.
This is death by Nature, and when mankind has learned the truth, when the time shall come—as come it will—that “there shall be no more an infant of days, nor an old man who hath not filled his days,” this act of death, now, as a rule, so dreaded because so premature, shall, arriving only at its appointed hour, suggest no terror, inflict no agony.