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Robert W. Carton, MA, MD

JAMA. 1990;263(16):2221.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In this issue of THE JOURNAL, Sprung¹ finds American medicine further along the road to euthanasia than is commonly thought. His argument can be summarized as follows: With the development of the technology of life support during the past 30 years, severely ill persons have survived in coma, in the chronic vegetative state, or in other states of great impairment. These persons formerly would have died relatively promptly after the insult that precipitated their condition. Now they are shielded from cardiopulmonary collapse and death by the modern forms of life support, which extend from complex volume ventilators to simple methods of feeding by gastrostomy tube. To cope with the problems presented by this population, our society has revised the definition of "death" (as in the Harvard report of 1968)² and relaxed the standards for maintenance of life (as in the Quinlan case of 1976).³ Who may be . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Department of Internal Medicine and the Section of Ethics, Department of Religion and Health, Rush-Presbyterian—St Luke's Medical Center, Chicago, Ill.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to Department of Internal Medicine, Rush-Presbyterian—St Luke's Medical Center, 1653 W Congress Pkwy, Chicago, IL 60612 (Dr Carton).

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