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(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

John Ormsby

British Medical Journal, BMJ — British Medical Journal

Extract
I explained to her the cause and said ” You will have another dead child, then I shall treat you and you shall have a living one.” Now comes the question of conscience. ” Why not now ?” she asked. ” Because it is not expedient that the child at present in your womb should live.” I considered that no treatment could make such a change in it as to make life anything but a curse. Between seven and eight months she was again delivered of a dead child. I then put her under mercurial treatment. In twelve months she had a perfectly healthy son. I put this son under mercury for twelve months, keeping up the mother’s treatment uninterruptedly for three years. She had three more perfectly healthy children in rapid succession, which were not treated separately. Two years ago I visited the town and found them out and four better grown, better looking (they had all their mother’s beauty) or more intelligent young men and women you could not find in their station in life, two were married and had healthy children. . . Miss Kenealy’s conscience and mine, I think, are at one on the question.

Ormsby J. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1813):806.

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

JNC

Extract
The doctrine that we may determine who are fit to live and who are not-for this is what her practice really comes to has for some time past been abandoned by civilised nations, and although the race would doubtless be improved if the doctrine could be successfully applied, it is, apart from other considerations, too dangerous a one, for man and woman too is prone to err.

JNC. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1813):807.

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

J Braxton Hicks

Extract
In view, therefore, of our uncertainties and of our defective insight as to the present and of our absolute blindness as to the future I would say, that if we have the power of checking these abortions, it will be wise, and therefore right to exercise that power. And that we do possess by various means such a power, I have no doubt in a considerable number of cases. . . But the principle underlying our rule of action here discussed is of far wider application than to the case of abortions, for, if it be right to suspend treatment in what we guess to be Nature’s wisdom, so we should, in the event of Nature’s apparent failure, be wise in interfering in the opposite direction, and to this end adopt measures to cause and assist Nature to expel its contents, which we guess to be in a damaged condition; but this, my experience has shown, would in the long run be destructive of a considerable number of foetuses that might, for ought we know, have become ornaments and useful members of society. And so, how can we logically limit this principle to the treatment of abortions alone? Why not apply it to the newborn infant which to us seems to be ineligible to live, and in the poor morsel of being, described only too truly, why not refuse it succour; and why not assist it out of its troubles in a dream of euthanasia? and the limit cannot rest here; we must apply the principle through all medicine and surgery; and not least in mental diseases. Where can we stop?

Hicks JB. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1813):805-808.

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

MG Biggs

Extract
The sight of such an unfortunate child could not fail to produce the deepest compassion, and even indignation, when one records the fact that syphilis is a preventable disease, but when this induces Dr. Kenealy to tear up her prescription surely it is mere continentalism, and also a running away from the bounden duty of relieving the unhappy mother and yet unborn child, to save whom she was called in.

Biggs M. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1813):806-807.

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

TCA

Extract
A physician is called in to a pregnant woman in whom abortion threatens. The disturbance is found to be due to syphilis. The physician retires to another room . . .to write a prescription. There she sees a child of the same woman which she finds to be diseased. . . . the physician, finding the child an uncomfortable object, deprives the mother of the antidote prepared for her in order that the foetus in utero may abort. . . Miss Kenealy will no doubt admit that it is constructively the same thing as to procure abortion. . .I think Miss Kenealy’s attitude is defective.

TCA. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1812):746-747.

(Correspondence) A Question of Conscience

Arabella Kenealy

Extract
(Letter explains why she declined to treat a pregnant woman for syphilis, prevent spontaneous abortion). Nor can mercury by any possibility so affect the evolutionary impulse of an embryo as to carry it beyond the type Mongolian. For it would seem that the effect of syphilis is to retard evolution in such wise that from Caucasian parents an offspring characteristically Mongolian results-and that not a healthy but a maimed Mongolian. . . I could not persuade myself that the prevention of abortion by mercury argues that mercury is capable of bringing an embryonic child up to the desired human standard. I could not hope that its administration would do more than so enfeeble the mother’s physical conscience, and render it so insensate that it would fail to repudiate that which it was the bounden duty of its evolutionary instinct to repudiate.

Kenealy A. (Correspondence) A Question of Conscience. Br Med J. 1895;2(1811):682.