These are by some moralists considered very delicate questions in ethics. Desgenettes has been highly applauded for the reply he made to Bonaparte’s suggestion, that it would be better for the miserable sick left by the French army at Jaffa to be drugged with opium: “It is my business to save life, not to destroy it.” But, in approving the physician, we must not harshly condemn the commanding officer. When we reflect on the condition of the men whom the fortune of war compelled him to abandon, and the certainty of a horrible death to each victim from wasting disease or Turkish cruelty, a rational philanthropist might well desire to smooth their passage to the grave.
During the employment of torture for the purposes of tyranny in Church and State, a physician or surgeon was at hand, whose whole duty it was to suspend the process whenever it became probable that nature would yield under its pressure, and the victim would escape through the opening, glad gates of death. It was then esteemed an act of mercy to give, or permit to be given by the executioner, a fatal blow, hence called emphatically and justly the _coup de grace_. In the terrible history of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, we shudder to read that, after their expulsion from Moscow, the French soldiers, in repassing the fields of battles fought days and even weeks previously, found many of their comrades, there wounded and left, still dragging out a wretched and hopeless existence, amidst the corpses of those more fortunately slain outright, and perishing miserably and slowly of cold and hunger, and festering and gangrenous wounds. One need not surely offer a single argument to prove, all must feel and admit that the kindest office of humanity, under the circumstances, would have been to put an end to this indescribable mass of protracted wretchedness by the promptest means that could be used to extinguish so horrible a life.
A common case presents itself from time to time to every practitioner, in which all hope is avowedly extinct, and yet, in consonance with uniform custom, stimulants are assiduously prescribed to prolong existence in the midst of convulsive and delirious throes, not to be looked on without dismay. In some such contingencies, where the ultimate result was palpably certain, I have seen them at last abandoned as useless and worse, in order that nature, irritated and excited, lashed into factitious and transitory energy, might sink into repose; and have felt a melancholy satisfaction in witnessing the tranquillity, so soft and gentle, that soon ensued; the stormy agitation subsiding into a calm and peaceful decay.