Hippocrates' Oath and Asclepius' Snake by T.A. Cavanaugh;

Author:T.A. Cavanaugh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

3.3.3 Attempts to Make Physicians Apollonian

Guillotin exemplifies the Apollonian physician who proposes to kill less harmfully. Corresponding to the Apollonian physician, one finds a public requesting that doctors kill. Recall the words of the anthropologist Margaret Mead (noted previously in 1.3). She writes:

society is always attempting to make the physician into a killer—to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient, … it is the duty of society to protect the physician from such requests. (Levine 1972, 324-5)

Mead observes that we repeatedly ask physicians to kill. I wish, briefly, to note that our attempts do not seem to have flagged.

One finds contemporary governments asking physicians (and allied caregivers such as nurses and pharmacists) to be significantly involved in capital punishment. Indeed, some governments even require that the death penalty include a physician’s extensive participation. In the United States, the state of North Carolina mandates that physicians and nurses (and, by implication, pharmacists) participate closely in carrying out the death penalty (in contrast to cooperating in an incidental fashion by, e.g., a doctor certifying death). The Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled that the North Carolina Medical Board (which licenses physicians) cannot restrict physician participation in capital punishment to the physician being physically present at an execution. Rather, in opposition to the Medical Board’s (on the face of things, principled and balanced) stance, the legislature can, as it did in North Carolina General Statute 15-190, require that a physician “monitor the essential body functions of the condemned inmate and notify the Warden immediately upon his or her determination that the inmate shows signs of undue pain or suffering.”

Notably, the legislature decrees that the physician be employed lest undue pain and suffering in the administration of the death penalty render the same a violation of the US Constitution’s eighth amendment, prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment.” This instances an Apollonian view of the physician as a harm-reducer. So conceived, one would naturally enlist a physician so as to punish least harmfully. Of course, this account of medicine errs. For it proposes that punishing (which necessarily involves the imposition of a harm) comports with medicine. Yet, medicine exclusively cares for a subject. Moreover, it avoids harming, especially deliberate harming—even in order to reduce overall harm. Additionally, as noted, one mistakenly thinks of the condemned as a proper subject of the physician’s therapy (or the subject of medical caregivers more generally—nurses and pharmacists). Caregivers administer to patients, those laboring under illness. While dire, being condemned to death does not make one a patient. Thus, those who would have caregivers punish stray widely.

Referring to the incompatibility of punishing and medicine, the North Carolina Medical Board (in its prohibition of a physician’s so monitoring the condemned) noted that “physician participation in capital punishment is a departure from the ethics of the medical profession” (N. C. 2009, 645). Additionally, the Medical Board cited the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics section 2.06, which distinguishes the personal opinion

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