The Philosopher's Pipe

They would smoke and discuss things like

'the visum of a cow'

He was the person who understood Grice more than anyone. He was a gent. He was Vice-Chancelor of Oxford. And he was a genius.

And Chapman keeps misquoting him as "G. L."

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From the Telegraph online:
Baroness tells how GP helped her husband die
By Caroline Davies
External Links
Voluntary Euthanasia Society
Euthanasia - Ethics Updates
Euthanasia and the Right to Die Discussion Forum
BARONESS Warnock, who sat on the House of Lords select committee on
euthanasia, yesterday supported a GP who admitted inducing the deaths of
two patients using morphine, and told how he had enabled her husband to die
peacefully.
Lady Warnock, 73, said that Dr Nick Maurice had changed the dosage of
morphine administered to her husband, Sir Geoffrey, 72, probably hastening
his death but sparing his suffering. She had asked Dr Maurice to do the
same for her if necessary.
She said her husband, who was dying from a lung condition, had been
terrified that he would suffocate. But Dr Maurice promised him he would not
allow it. Shortly after the doseage change, her husband passed away
peacefully.
She spoke as Dr Maurice, 54, a GP in Marlborough, Wilts, entered the fierce
debate on euthanasia after writing in his surgery newsletter how he used
morphine to ease the suffering of two patients, and aid their "quiet and
easy" deaths. He stressed that he was against the legalisation of the
induction of a patient's death because he had "grave concern" over how an
induced death would be handled.
Lady Warnock, who sat on the Archbishop of Canterbury's Advisory Group on
Medical Ethics, said she and Dr Maurice, her family doctor for many years,
never talked about what exactly he had done prior to the death of Sir
Geoffrey 18 months ago.
"Nick knew and I knew that perhaps my husband would have gone on a little
longer. But it would have meant terrible suffering. I didn't want to say,
'Just how much morphine are you giving him?' I knew he was on morphine and
when Nick said he was changing the medication, I knew exactly what he
meant. It was completely unspoken."
She said her husband, a former vice-chancellor of Oxford University and
himself a prominent philosopher, had been seeing a consultant for many
months, but was told one day: "There is no point in you coming back."
They both knew what that meant, she said. She had already lodged a form
with Dr Maurice stating that she did not want to be kept alive artificially
herself if she became ill. "We were in Nick's hands. We knew Geoffrey had
not many more weeks or months," she said at her home in Great Bedwyn, near
Marlborough.
"At that time, there was a TV programme about a doctor administering a
lethal injection to a terminally-ill man in the Netherlands. It showed the
man saying to the doctor, 'Now is the time'. We were sitting together and
we both agreed that we could never say, 'Now is the time'.
"We couldn't have made that decision ourselves. It was too difficult. I
would always have reproached myself that I had hurried him on. But I had
absolute trust in Nick, because I knew he was an excellent doctor.
He knew exactly what I thought about this kind of thing. He knew also that
I was on the House of Lords select committee. My husband was in a terrible
state. He couldn't breathe and every day he was getting worse, so he
couldn't have gone on for very long."
Lady Warnock, former mistress at Girton College, Cambridge, who chaired the
Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation, said her husband was
"enormously relieved" when Dr Maurice promised he would not let him die
from suffocation. "It was a great weight off his mind," she said.
"He had a peaceful death. He had visitors in the afternoon, then he simply
pegged out. There were no awful struggles. He didn't have to go to
hospital. And it was completely the way it ought to have been.
If that is what Nick did, and I say 'if' because he has never spoken about
it, then I am intensely grateful. He is a brilliant doctor."
Dr Maurice, a GP for 20 years, declared in his open letter to his patients
that he had not "killed" the two patients, but had given sufficient
morphine to stop their suffering. "We doctors are practising euthanasia all
the time and should be proud of it," he wrote.
Lady Warnock said she supported all Dr Maurice had written, and stressed
she was talking about the lives of terminally-ill patients only.