#12: Euthanasia machine

 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.

#11: Chess pieces

Recently I have been playing chess, against both human and digital opponents. I enjoy it, plus it has the powerful negative virtue of making you forget everything else while you are playing.

But does chess help you develop any skills useful for life? In his early 16^th century book The Courtier, which discusses how a renaissance man of the court should act and live, Castiglione thinks it a waste of time to spend too much time it, since at the end you will know ‘no more but a game’. ‘A noble science’ is much more worthwhile:

‘Who ever will be excellent in the playe of chestes, I beleave he must beestowe much tyme about it, and applie it with so much study, that a man may assoone learne some noble scyence, or compase any other matter of importaunce, and yet in the ende in beestowing all that laboure, he knoweth no more but a game. Therfore in this I beleave there happeneth a very rare thing, namely, that the meane is more commendable, then the excellency.’

Judit Polgar, who became a grandmaster in 1991 at the age of 15, disagrees:

‘Playing chess has many aspects that can be useful in everyday situations like planning, concentration and combinations. You learn to win but also to lose and to be creative.’

I am not so sure about this. Chess requires concentration and planning, but I don’t know how far these are transferable beyond the chessboard. People don’t play by such strict rules in life, love or war.

The 19^th century scientist and essayist T H Huxley went further, saying it was ‘an elementary truth’ that life is like a game of chess, but ‘infinitely more difficult and complicated’:

‘The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.’ (A Liberal Education, 1868).

Education, for Huxley, consisted in learning the rules of this game. I am not sure who his hidden player is – perhaps this is a nod to God, or to those who believed in one. But as the essay goes on the hidden player disappears and Nature takes over, sounding anything but fair: ‘Nature’s discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word.’ This is more in tune with Darwin’s discoveries about ruthless competition among organisms, which of course Huxley championed (although he was not fully convinced about natural selection). He leaves the chessboard metaphor behind.

But I do like it when the rules of chess are played around with – as in Alice in Wonderland, with its snoozing king and racing queen. I would also think of A S Byatt’s Possession, in which Victorian wife Ellen Ash regularly plays chess with the visiting vicar. One night she has a suffocating dream in which her queen can only move one square at a time, like a king, while her opponent’s queen can move freely. We are left to make our own links with her life as an intelligent, capable woman whose main role, partly self-imposed, is to create a comfortable home and be an amanuensis and adviser to her poet husband. She has learned to play by the rules, as Huxley advises, but at some cost.

#10: Mariana

This is the only Pre-Raphaelite picture that I like, really. It shows Mariana, still in love with Angelo, deputy to the Duke of Vienna, who rejected her when her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. The story is from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and was originally exhibited at the Royal Academy with these lines from Tennyson’s Mariana:

She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

The life of this woman is made up of surfaces and representations. She is working on a piece of sewing showing flowers and leaves, with leaves scattered around which presumably she has been copying. When she stands up from her work, she can only see the outside world through stained glass. Behind her the wall itself is patterned, and there is a desk with religious images to contemplate (perhaps for kneeling at, since there is no chair).

She stands up to stretch her back like someone who has sat at a computer too long, (also in a virtual world). It is this that I like, I think – the naturalness and motion in her posture. If you wanted to you could take this as a critique of Pre-Raphaelite art itself – a rejection of the poses, the symbolism, the intricately ornamented surfaces.

And yet I’m drawn to such interiors too – they speak also of a peaceful contemplative existence. I would pair it with a picture like this, by William Ratcliffe, one of the ‘Camden Town’ group of early 20^th century artists. He often painted artists’ rooms and houses; this is called ‘cottage interior’. A cup of tea on the table, a vase of flowers, everyday greenery outside – ordinary pleasures.

Picture sources:

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-mariana-t07553

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/william-ratcliffe-the-artists-room-letchworth-r1139846