Hospice or Hemlock?: Searching for Heroic Compassion

by Constance E. Putnam

End-of-life decision making is often viewed from an academic perspective, which can obscure the debate's central human concerns. This guide introduces general readers to people with personal stakes in the right-to-die conundrum. Putnam provides practical assistance to readers and their loved ones, simultaneously incorporating the abstract and theoretical analysis essential to examining how we die in contemporary Western society. She also presents the backgrounds of the Hospice and Right-to-Die (Hemlock) Movements.

To elucidate the human side of the debate, Putnam profiles and interviews six important
• Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern Hospice Movement
• Derek Humphry, founder of The Hemlock Society in the U.S.
• Herbert Cohen, an early leader in euthanasia circles in The Netherlands
• Timothy Quill, whose assistance in a patient suicide resulted in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court
• Joanne Lynn, founder of Americans for Better Care for the Dying
• Jack Kevorkian (profiled, but unavailable for interview)

Another unique feature of this book is the application of philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson's general theory of rights to the very specific right to die. Pointing to potential compatibilities between the two positions, she concludes that heroic compassion does not require a final choice between Hospice and Hemlock―there may be room enough for both.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2002

About the author

Constance Putnam is a non-fiction writer with wide-ranging experience in journalism; she has also written (and co-authored) books and currently spends most of her time writing on medical history. The biography of Dartmouth Medical School's founder Nathan Smith (Improve, Perfect, and Perpetuate: Dr. Nathan Smith and Early American Medical Education [University Press of New England, 1998], of which she is a co-author, has been called "a good read" by one medical historian and "one of the best medical biographies I have read" by another. With interests that encompass far more than medical history, she has published a sizable body of work in other fields of history as well as on issues pertaining to social justice. Included are articles on architectural history, medical ethics, death and dying, community service, capital punishment, and the challenges of providing adequate low-income housing in the United States and abroad. She is a native New Englander, having been born and raised in New Hampshire; for the past two decades and more she has lived in Massachusetts, in a house where she and her husband pursue their independent and joint writing projects in back-to-back studies.