"I don't want anyone to leave here tonight thinking I would give your Aunt Tilda enough morphine to kill her," said Michael Barry '60, M.D., director of thoracic surgery at Walter Reed Hospital.

Barry was among the Boston College alumni who gathered at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., November 14 to watch a simulcast of the Boston symposium "The Challenge of Medical Knowledge." The panel featured Sherwin Nuland, M.D., a surgeon at Yale-New Haven Medical Center, and Jerome Groopman, M.D., an oncologist at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Barry was reacting to Nuland's frank account of having injected a dying woman with a lethal dose of morphine.

Though Nuland portrayed his act as a humane one undertaken to prevent the further suffering of the patient's family, Barry, sparing no words, called it murder. "When a doctor stops a heart and gets it to start up again," Barry said, "it's marvelous. Any cardiac surgeon who doesn't see divinity just around the corner is wrong." Barry's remarks evoked a subdued ripple of applause from an audience of about a hundred BC alumni who'd come to struggle with the ethical questions posed by the two doctors -- Nuland the agnostic and Groopman the believer, reared in an Orthodox Jewish tradition.

Leading the Washington dialogue were Callista Roy, CSJ, a BC professor and nursing theorist, and Robert Drinan, SJ, the former dean of Boston College Law School, who now teaches at Georgetown University Law School. The Washington event was sponsored by the Boston College Alumni Association. According to director Grace Cotter Regan, it represented the "start of programming that the University will do throughout the country. We feel these are the kinds of philosophical discussions BC graduates should have with each other and with the world."

The evening quickly developed into a discussion on how to make moral decisions in the context of expanding scientific knowledge. Fr. Drinan pointed out that the Jesuit tradition of bringing faith and reason together would be useful in dealing with advances on the scientific front. "I don't think that the Church has ever been afraid of new knowledge," he said. "Knowledge is sent by God, but sometimes people are intimidated by the explosion of new biological knowledge.

"We should discern everything knowable about the universe," Fr. Drinan continued. "When I try to dialogue with Creationists, who believe God created the world in seven days, they are scared of knowledge."

Much of the discussion centered on defining core principles. "Humanism doesn't tell us everything," said Roy. "That's not the whole story." She said she had come up with the notion of "the purposefulness of each human being," including, she added, the concept of the "common destiny" of all human beings.

"It's the unity of humankind here and in the hereafter that makes us acutely aware of the principles to be used," Roy said -- whether the dilemma is environmental pollution or research using fetal tissue.

Peter Savage '64, a physician at the National Institutes of Health, raised a practical concern. "For many of these issues," he said, "there's not an answer written down somewhere that you can look up." Catholic institutions, Savage said, must help form consciences equipped to deal with difficult medical-ethics issues. "We tend as a society to choose what's most emotionally gratifying," said Savage. "I worry that there's not enough of an educated and articulate voice from the Catholic community to point out how the fundamentals apply."

Roy agreed, adding that "the believer needs to explore these issues and put forth beliefs so that the choices of the culture are moral. The Church cannot shy away from dialogue about these issues because they are hard."

Although most of the talk was on a philosophical level, the story of Nuland's terminally ill patient clearly bothered participants. Michael Buono, a financial consultant and a guest at the event, found Nuland "more callous and gruff" than Groopman. "He [Nuland] made a unilateral decision to end her life," Buono said. "He had a pragmatic attitude -- suffering is bad. This woman may have been able to give something to one of her children before she died."

"For [Nuland], the body is a machine," Roy said, "and there isn't anything afterward. From my own experience, I can tell you that moments of being with people in that transition are very precious. That is the moment of grace, and it's not right for a doctor to interfere with that moment of grace." As the evening broke up, Peg Mastel, CEO of Health Services for Children with Special Needs in Washington, D.C., who was there to visit with her friend, Sister Roy, summed up the event: "This was such a Jesuit thing to do -- get conversation started by presenting two divergent views."

Charlotte Hays

Charlotte Hays is editor of The Women's Quarterly.

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