| Description |
Roger Magnusson's angels of death describes the practice of extralegal assisted suicide and euthanasia by physicians, nurses, technicians, and other health care professionals who provide care to seriously ill patients and patients with AIDS who are dying. It is based on a snowball sample of 49 detailed interviews carried out over a period of three years with health professionals specializing in the care of patients with the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS, principally in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, and in San Francisco. This book is about cooperative euthanasia - that is, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia occurring underground, mainly among patients with AIDS at home and those in large, tertiary-care hospitals in the United States and Australia. It describes networking among sympathetic physicians, nurses, and other health care workers and traces patterns of referral. It portrays ways in which health care professionals provide advice about drugs, assistance to those who wish to obtain drugs (often from an underground pharmacy), and informal psychiatric assessments. It also describes how they manipulate hospital procedures, fabricate information when signing death certificates, and collaborate with funeral directors in the orchestration and general facilitation of assisted dying at the bedside. It describes ways they may support both the patient and the family as well as debrief the family after a death. |
