Feb 20th, 2021 by Derek Humphry
Did you happen to see Thursday night’s program “Father Brown” on PBS TV ?
It featured two deaths which at first seemed normal to the police but which the great ministerial R.C. ‘detective’ suspected to be murder.
He eventually found that both persons, who had advanced cancer, had been gassed. A person who believed in euthanasia had provided them each with a gas mask and a bottle of gas (did not say which gas) and they chose to self-deliver.
The story was set between l945-50 UK because there was talk of food rationing.
The Euthanasia Society in London was formed in l935 and a bill on assisted suicide failed in Parliament in 1936, as it still does. But the subject was then very little known.
I suspect the script writer used today’s open knowledge of inert gas self-deliverance to reach back 60 years for a story line. Father Brown naturally did not approve, but the program was not on the whole judgemental. Unusual.
Tags: assisted death, Assisted Suicide, choice in dying, Derek Humphry, euthanasia and assisted death, right to die, Self-Deliverance, terminal illness