Ethical challenges

Abstract

This chapter studies the early modern debates on major ethical challenges that arose in palliative care and which are still at the heart of medical ethics today: The permissibility of intentionally shortening of a dying person’s life, of giving medicines to alleviate a patient’s suffering that might accelerate the approach of death and of forgoing the attempt to cure dying patients, at the risk that the occasional, only seemingly desperate patient could have been saved by more radical means. The chapter highlights the very lively – and so far virtually unknown – debate on popular practices like “pulling the pillow” which were explicitly designed to speed up the dying process. In conclusion, it examines attitudes towards truth-telling and shows that physicians, fearing negative effects on the body, were unanimous that patients should be kept ignorant of their fatal prognosis as long as possible.