Abstract
Although euthanasia or assisted suicide have been practiced for at least two millennia, the current scholarly debate about assisted dying began to take shape in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Thanks to a confluence of developments during that period, death became increasingly ‘medicalized,’ i.e., the time or manner of a person’s death fell more and more under human technological control.
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Notes
- 1.
The latter, withdrawing life-sustaining measures, has come to be known as ‘passive’ euthanasia.
- 2.
At the stage of finalizing this volume, Jukka Varelius benefited from a generous research grant from the Kone Foundation.
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Cholbi, M., Varelius, J. (2015). Introduction. In: Cholbi, M., Varelius, J. (eds) New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 64. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22050-5_1
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