| Text-Only
Version
Dr. Bernard Lown '42, 1985 Nobel Peace
Prize Winner: "I assembled a group of doctors and we began to address
this awesome issue that is still with us. What we did is we were all
young academics, we were meeting in my living room week after week
trying to figure out a way--"how can we begin to reverse the
cause"--because it seemed inevitable, inexorable, that the world was
going to destroy itself. Each side was just amassing weapons, the time
between launch and strike was reduced to 25 minutes and no intelligent
people can make decisions about how to respond or whether it's a true or
a spurious signal that we are receiving.
We decided to shock the public into awareness by doing something which
hadn't been done. We'll bomb Boston with a multi-megaton attack and
we'll extrapolate the physical, psychologic and medical consequences. We
realized quickly that such an attack in metropolitan Boston, [with its
population of 2,875,000, that] a million would have been killed
instantly. A million would have been fatally injured and died an
excruciating death within the ensuing days. An additional 500,000 [of
the inured] would have been likely to survive. Only 10 percent of
physicians in Boston would live, namely 650, to attend hundreds,
thousands. We figured out if a doctor attended a single patient, spent
10 minutes, and worked 24 hours around the clock, seven days a week,
he'd see the same patient again about 14 days later. Without drugs,
without electricity, without sewage disposal, surrounded by endless dead
bodies, for which there was no planning by the military--it reminds us
of something--the only humane thing a doctor could do was to practice
euthanasia. Because for the highly injured, grieving, vomiting,
retching, irradiated, burned human being, the only meaningful act of
mercy is euthanasia, but society did not sanction them, give doctors the
power to kill. So, society said, 'Look, you: if you're going to have
nuclear war, empower your doctors to become killers!'" |
