Marcia Angell, MD, MACP, Sr. Lecturer, Dept. of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Faculty Assoc. in the Ctr for Bioethics. Trained in internal medicine and anatomic pathology at Boston Univ. School of Medicine, she joined the editorial staff of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979, was named Exec Editor in 1988, and Editor-in-Chief in 1999. Summary: Dying in America changed greatly after World War II, mainly because of the development of new drugs and technologies. Although that resulted in many welcome cures, it also created great suffering in patients who were terminally ill. Starting in the 1970s, the problem began to attract attention and by 1990, the right of patients or their proxies to refuse life-sustaining treatment became recognized. But the right to forego life-sustaining treatment left the problem of what to do for terminally ill patients not receiving such treatment. In the 1990s, a controversial movement argued that physicians should have the right to help such patients end their lives faster and more peacefully. Now, assisted dying (physician-assisted suicide) is legal in five states, including California.

Electrical Engineering 140, 001 - Spring 2014 Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee140/sp14/lectures.html