Following on Wesley J. Smith and Daniel Reeves’s fine comments about the horrific “suicide pod,” or Sarco, now put into action in Switzerland, I want to add that I was struck by the juxtaposition of that news with physician Stephen Iacoboni’s lovely and humane article from this morning. See, “My Briar Patch: Notes of a Country Doctor.”

Wesley cites the man who invented Sarco: “The ghoulish Australian ‘doctor’ Philip Nitschke has long been obsessed with making suicide readily available.” Putting the medical title between quote marks was an apt touch. Compare Nitschke’s dark work with what Dr. Iacoboni, an oncologist, says about the true calling of a doctor. He refers to the “sacred space between doctor and (cancer) patient” and how entering into it changed him:

I began my career resolutely adherent to materialism. But after countless interactions with cancer’s crucible, I finally learned to see and touch the human soul. It was from there that I began my quest to describe what precedes science and materialism. My experience as an oncologist thus taught me the reality of the spiritual realm.

I would guess that other humane physician-writers we know — Michael Egnor, Howard Glicksman, Geoffrey Simmons, with their own different but converging perspectives on the design of life — would recognize that from their own experiences. 

So imagine the perversion of the medical calling represented by a figure like Nitschke. He is at an extreme, but not alone. When my dad was dying, I saw both sides of the healthcare world, one that fought stubbornly to save a life and the other that was coldly indifferent and even eager to end it. 

Having practiced medicine at the very edge of life, the “ghoulish” Nitschke evidently has not learned the reality of the spiritual — the “presence of the Unseen,” as William James put it — at all. Or the other possibility is that he has learned it, and that is what drives his hunger for death. But I’d rather not imagine that.