Usually, it's done in secret. In the few cases in which physician-assisted suicide has been made public, the doctors were not successfully prosecuted. Most graduating medical students take a modified version of the oath, which varies from school to school. The American Medical Association strongly opposes doctor-assisted suicide, yet surveys show 50 to 60 percent of doctors favor legalizing it. Only now, for example, is Brown's medical school developing a curriculum on the topic.
Doctors learn to treat, to intervene, to strive against disease.
But they are not taught what to do when medicine is powerless to heal. Death becomes viewed as a failure. And from there springs the urge to do something more, to try yet one more intervention. But Dr. Herbert Hendin, the psychiatrist who heads the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and one of the most passionate opponents of physician-assisted suicide, argues that doctors' discomfort with death often underlies their support for assisted suicide. The physician, not the illness, is responsible for the death.