The Citizen Convention on the End of Life will have to submit, in March, an opinion on the legalization of assisted suicide or euthanasia, prior to a possible law on the subject. At the same time, a reflection group led by the academician Erik Orsenna was responsible for “conceiving a lexicon of the words of the end of life”, explains Béatrice Jérôme in MO12345lemonde, December 23, 2022.
This is to know what we are talking about. “The word” euthanasia “is not a nice word, complained, on November 17 on France 2, Olivier Véran, government spokesperson. It is a word that is connoted in the French language.” According to the Greek etymology (EU, “good” and Thanatos, “death”), the term however means “good death”. Over time, we preferred periphrases to him: “beautiful death”, “sweet death”, “death of grace” or “death in dignity”.
In MO12345lemonde, the use of the word started on a false track, a doubtful sense that will continue and discredit it. On October 16, 1945, he appeared in an unsigned Entrefilet which reported the trial of Nazi doctors and nurses in the Hadamar asylum, Germany, described as “euthanasia dispensers”. “In this establishment, tens of thousands of Germans, alienated or incurable, had been exterminated,” writes the newspaper.
Same confusion on December 6, 1946, in a short article on the Nuremberg trial, which judged “twenty-three doctors who practiced vivisection and euthanasia on internees of concentration camps”. This semantic misuse, this amalgamation with eugenics and medical assassination will then disturb the political and societal debate.
In his medical chronicle of December 28, 1946, Flavien Bonnet-Roy tried to put the word back on the right rails. In this immediate post-war period, 1,500 international doctors ask, in a motion filed with the UN, the right to what they prefer to name “legal homicide by charity”. “Thus the question of euthanasia, of gentle, caused death, is once again on the agenda, waiting for the term itself, which has been banished so far, finds it straight of cited in the dictionary of the French Academy, “writes Flavien Bonnet-Roy, himself a doctor in the city.
“It is by an abuse of singular language that we claimed to understand in euthanasia I do not know what right of the community to exclude from its breast the abnormal, the insane, the degenerate, the non-values of all species, “continues the doctor. It is nonetheless reluctant: “We do not think that euthanasia can enter our customs.” He notes: “The duty of the doctor, within a humanity dedicated to all miseries, is a difficult duty , and it is perhaps when his art has become helpless that the problems that arise for his conscience are the most scary. “
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