'A Prey on Normal People': C. Killick Millard and the Euthanasia Movement in Great Britain, 1930-55

Few issues in medicine and society today are more controversial than euthanasia.1 In Canada national attention was recently fixed on the trial of Robert Latimer, found guilty of performing euthanasia on his severely handicapped daughter in 1993 by carbon monoxide poisoning. In May 1998 the first physician convicted of assisted suicide in North America was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. In the USA Jack Kevorkian, the so-called 'Dr Death', assisted the death of Thomas Youk, an event that was witnessed on videotape in 1998 by viewers of the CBS television programme, Sixty Minutes, and led to Kevorkian's conviction on the charge of murder. In 1997 the US Supreme Court ruled that though there was no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide, individual states could legalize the practice, which the state of Oregon promptly proceeded to do. Oregon joins the Netherlands, where over the last 20 years Dutch doctors who perform euthanasia have enjoyed virtual immunity from prosecution, protected by a body of case law and strong public support, though as of late 1999 assisted suicide has remained a crime. Those who support and those who oppose the legalization of euthanasia agree on very little. But they seem to agree that society has reached a crossroads and that legal and legislative decisions that lie just ahead will determine whether or not the right to die becomes a widespread reality.2