The euthanasia machine looks like an old-fashioned laptop
connected to a set of gadgets and wires in an open plastic suitcase, with
syringes and a gauge prominent. A white and yellow box of the barbiturate
Nembutal stands in front of it. Part of an exhibition about controversial
issues in science, it occupies an out-of-the-way corner near a lift in the
museum’s Wellcome wing.
Not everyone agrees that it should be displayed. A blogger for the Susan B. Anthony
List, an American anti–abortion organisation, wrote after a visit: ‘Upon
recovering from my original shock, I…found it slightly offensive that they
would put a tool for suicide on display at a museum that is frequented by
families and schoolchildren.’
It was developed and
donated to the museum by Dr Philip Nitschke, a former doctor and
passionate pro-euthanasia campaigner, founder and head of Exit International, Australia’s best-known pro-euthanasia
organisation. Four people used the machine to end their lives between 1995 and
1997 in Australia’s Northern Territory, when euthanasia was legal there.
Nitschke then donated the machine to the museum, and it went on display in
2000. He had originally offered the machine to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney,
but decided not to go ahead when he learnt that it might be relegated to
basement storage.
‘It seems to me
you lose the respect of society when a patient is in dire circumstances, and
asks you what you can do to help, and
you draw back and say, “I’m sorry, that is forbidden”’, Nitschke told
Australian magazine Quadrant in 2002.
He added that the machine meant that the patient could end their life with only
their family or friends present – the doctor didn’t have to be there.
The Science Museum hopes that the machine will make people
think about euthanasia. I agree that it should; there needs to be a space
(sometimes literally) outside polemic to consider such important things and
museums can provide that. Objects can too, partly I think because as non-verbal
things they do not try to impose conclusions on you so much, and partly also
because they are a reminder of the reality of events, actions or places. My own
conclusion after looking at the machine and doing associated research is that
euthanasia should be permitted, with strong safeguards.
I’m also interested in what museums do and do not display.
In museums you can see mantraps, guns and slave manacles. A particle
accelerator which contributed to the development of the atomic bomb is
displayed around the corner from the euthanasia machine (together with a dish
found in the ruins of one of the Japanese cities which was bombed). But I’ve
yet to hear of a museum which displays an abortion pump or vivisection
equipment (both used legally).
I leave the last word to King’s College microbiologist
Andrew Lilley, who has seen the machine many times. He says:
‘You knew that four people had died using it, and the
ordinariness of the equipment compared with what they actually did with it is
really quite shocking. I still in essence feel that people who want to end
their lives should be able to, but I now understand better the caution some
people have. And the piece of equipment helped me focus that.’
The euthanasia machine appears in my forthcoming book
Curiosities from the Cabinet, together with longer interviews with Philip
Nitschke and Andrew Lilley. Read a sample chapter here, about extinct things in museums.