Doctor-Aided Suicide Tale Saw Into Future

To the short list of genuine science-fiction prophets that includes H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke, you may now add Phil Weaver Jr., whose 1896 story eerily anticipated today’s emotional debate over physician-assisted suicide.

The recently unearthed story, with the uncanny title “A Legal Suicide, 1996,” confronts the same wrenching end-of-life dilemmas now being weighed by doctors, patients, philosophers and--last week--the U.S. Supreme Court.

If nothing else, this 12-page turn-of-the-century tale shows that the idea of enlisting doctors to help suffering, dying people commit suicide is not new, contrary to the widely held perception voiced in Wednesday’s court hearing by Justice David Souter. “This is all fairly recent,” he said. “Twenty years ago, we weren’t even discussing the issue.”

The oddly cheerful story is among the earliest known popular discussions of legalizing doctor-assisted suicide in the United States, though it has not been cited or evidently seen by contemporary authorities studying the issue, according to scholars who reviewed it for The Times. It was rediscovered by a University of Michigan librarian who was computer-scanning back issues of Overland Monthly magazine.

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“What’s so striking about the story is that it reminds us that the issue has not suddenly surfaced in the 1990s,” said Dr. Bernard Lo, director of the medical ethics program at UC San Francisco.

Subtitled “a fanciful look ahead,” Weaver’s story begins in December 1996, a year after California has passed a law allowing physician-assisted suicide under certain conditions. An old man named Capt. Stephenson is dying of stomach cancer in a Bay Area hospital. He wants help committing suicide because life is “torture.”

A nurse refuses. “I shall do anything I can for you, but not that,” she says. “I think it is morally wrong, though legally sanctioned by the new law. I worked against it with most of the other church people, but the philosophical unions had their lobbyists, and we were routed.”

Stephenson gets a lawyer, who pleads his case in a San Francisco court. Interestingly, much as lawyers argued before the Supreme Court last week that people have a constitutional “right” to die, Stephenson’s lawyer invokes the Declaration of Independence’s guarantees of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

A person “has a right to take his own life” and “must surely be allowed to exercise his liberty,” he intones, asking the jury to help “release this noble man from the fiendish clutches of a cancer.” And, deftly addressing religious opposition to the practice, he says, “Not while there is a merciful God in heaven, will man, made after His image, gaze on such suffering, and turn to stone.”

The district attorney counters that Stephenson’s disease is “curable,” despite what his doctors say, and appeals to the jury’s “conservatism,” asserting it would be “immoral” to grant the request.

The judge instructs the jury to decide whether Stephenson’s case meets the criteria for granting such requests in the imaginary 1995 law--a law that bears resemblance to the statute Oregon voters approved in 1994.

In the story, a person’s incurable, terminal illness has to be certified by at least two physicians; a “fortnight” must go by after a person makes the request, to rule out second thoughts, and temporary insanity has to be ruled out.

In the Oregon statute, which is currently blocked by a Portland court, outside doctors have to verify that a patient’s illness is incurable and likely to cause death within six months, and a psychiatrist has to rule out that the request reflects treatable depression.

“I was astonished by how modern and sophisticated the story was,” said Margaret Battin, a University of Utah philosopher and author of “The Least Worst Death,” a study of end-of-life dilemmas. “It’s an excellent review of the basic issues.”

The story is “interesting because it’s futuristic but not pessimistic,” she said. “This argues that things could be better.”

As for where Weaver got his inspiration, no one knows, but Battin said that the American philosopher Robert Ingersoll published an essay in 1895 titled “Is Suicide a Sin?”

In a way, Weaver’s story is all the more prophetic because “prolonged dying” was nowhere near as common then as today. “People were much less likely to survive wasting diseases like cancer beyond the point where they were bedridden because they got pneumonia,” Battin said. “That’s why pneumonia back then was known as ‘the old man’s friend.’ ”

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Little is known about the author of this far-seeing story, thanks apparently to the fleeting fame accorded those who engage in periodical journalism. He wrote articles on sports and travel for the Overland Monthly, then the West’s preeminent literary outlet, which published the likes of Jack London and was in business from 1868 to 1935.

Beyond that, Weaver remains a mystery. A search of standard library reference works turned up no books by him, and he does not warrant even a mention in the Cyclopedia of Biography, which takes note of far lesser imaginations.

Neither Death With Dignity, an advocacy group, nor Choice in Dying, an information clearinghouse, were aware of Weaver’s story or of any discussion of physician-assisted suicide that predates it.

“I know of nothing prior to this century” that discusses physician-assisted suicide in the United States, said Dr. Herbert Hendin, executive director of the American Suicide Foundation.

Hendin, a psychiatrist who opposes legalizing physician-assisted suicide, said he found Weaver’s unabashedly pro-suicide story “psychologically unconvincing.” Capt. Stephenson is reunited in the story with his long-lost son, and would not have been likely to want to die so soon, Hendin said. They had too much unfinished business.

“It’s an idealized story, showing the best possible outcome,” said UCSF’s Lo.

As Weaver’s story comes to a close, the jury grants the old man’s petition. Ten days later, the fateful day comes, with Stephenson bolstered up in bed, the Pacific surf booming in the distance.

The author imagined assisted suicide to be a heavily regulated practice, to prevent abuse. Present at the bedside are the resident physician, “the city physician,” the hospital superintendent, the sheriff and a minister. A young girl sings an unlikely song with the hard-to-rhyme line “There is no Death/What seems so is transition.” Stephenson’s son says goodbye.

Stephenson says, “God bless you all,” and then, clutching his departed wife’s photo, swallows a fatal dose of morphine.