The Mansion of Happiness (32 page)

The trial verdict included a statement about ethical standards for medical research, the Nuremberg Code. As important as the Nuremberg Code later became in the United States—it lay behind the founding, in the 1960s, of the field known as “bioethics”—the trials were virtually ignored in the 1940s. As the historian of medicine
David Rothman has pointed out, the American press failed to report on the
Nuremberg trials in 1946 and 1947 and paid almost no attention to the execution of seven of its convicted defendants in 1948. To the extent that Americans drew a lesson from Nuremberg, Rothman argues, it was that the government should not have
a hand in either science or medicine. “And here,” Rothman writes, “the distinction between the Nazi government and all other governments was lost.”
⁵⁹

The specter of Nazi medicine began to haunt the United States only in the 1960s.
Doctors of Infamy
, a much-redacted version of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial transcript, was translated from the German and published in New York in 1949, but it received very little attention until it was republished in London in 1962 as
The Death Doctors.
⁶⁰
That republication followed the 1961 trial of
Adolf Eichmann, who was hanged in 1962. In 1963, the
New Yorker
published
Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, her report on the trial. It cast considerable attention on Nuremberg; Dr.
Robert Servatius, Eichmann’s attorney, had also defended
Karl Brandt in 1946. Servatius’s defense of Eichmann was more or less the same as his defense of Brandt: these men, implicated in the torture and slaughter of millions of people, were simply following orders. Eichmann was an ordinary civil servant; Brandt, an ordinary doctor. Arendt told of one exchange between Servatius and the court. Eichmann, Servatius insisted, was innocent of charges regarding “the collection of skeletons, sterilizations, killings by gas, and
similar medical matters.
” The judge interrupted him: “Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter.” Servatius: “It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians;
it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter.
”
⁶¹

In the 1960s, Nazi medical atrocities, long ignored by the American press, captured Americans’ attention, not least because Americans were, at just that moment, obsessed with death and doctors. When death moved to the hospital, it got scarier: so far from home; so many machines; so many strangers; instruments that poke and prod; bright lights, sleepless nights. The more successfully medicine has staved off death, the less well anyone, including and maybe especially doctors and scientists, has accepted dying. The year the
New Yorker
ran
Eichmann in Jerusalem
,
Jessica Mitford published
The American Way of Death.
Some twelve hundred
books about death and bereavement came out between 1935 and 1968; twelve hundred more—including
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969
On Death and Dying
—were published between 1968 and 1973 alone. In 1974,
Publishers Weekly
announced, “Death is now selling books.”
⁶²

It didn’t matter that Nuremberg was about Nazi Germany—evil is banal; it could happen here.
If those German doctors had refused to test out the gas chamber in the 1930s, maybe many of the horrors of the twentieth century could have been averted. At the Quinlan trial, Porzio collapsed the distinction between Hitler’s Germany and the American government. “If the medical profession in Nazi Germany had shown more independence—if they had refused to partake in human experimentations,” Porzio told the court, “perhaps the Holocaust would not have been so great in terms of human lives and deformities.”
⁶³
That, Porzio argued, was why the doctors he was representing were unwilling to pull the plug. It wasn’t because the machines had gotten the upper hand. It wasn’t because those two doctors were afraid of being sued or charged with murder. No. They had refused to allow a severely brain-damaged and comatose woman with no hope of recovery to die … because they were not Eichmann. “We’re a strange, wonderful, sad country,” a
Los Angeles Times
reporter wrote. “We can’t decide how to live and we can’t decide how to die.”
⁶⁴

The Quinlan trial adjourned on October 27, 1975. Muir promised to issue his ruling in two weeks.

At seven o’clock in the morning on November 10, 1975, Father
Thomas Trapasso held Mass at Our Lady of the Lake. Joseph and Julia Quinlan had breakfast at their house on Ryerson Road, where a copy of
Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
hung on the wall above the dining room table.
⁶⁵
Then Joseph Quinlan drove, through a pelting rain, to Saint Clare’s, to visit his daughter, as he had done every day since she had first collapsed, seven months before. At noon, he drove to the rectory to have lunch with his wife and their priest, surrounded by reporters. “It’s like eating in a storefront window,” said Trapasso. After lunch, they got into Trapasso’s car and drove to the Morris County Courthouse.
⁶⁶

Television stations interrupted their programming to announce the decision.
⁶⁷
Muir denied Joseph Quinlan’s request. This is “a medical decision and not a judicial one,” Muir wrote. “There is no constitutional right to die.”
⁶⁸

The Quinlans decided to appeal to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which heard the case in Trenton on January 26, 1976.
⁶⁹
On March 31, the justices issued a unanimous opinion, reversing the lower court. It held that, despite Quinlan’s incompetence, her
right to refuse medical treatment was
protected under the
Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty, and that her father could exercise that right on her behalf. Agreeing with Armstrong, the court also grounded its ruling in the
right to privacy. Finally, it identified a role for the moral sense of the community.
⁷⁰
“If there is no reasonable possibility of Karen’s ever emerging from her present comatose condition to a cognitive, sapient state, the present life-support system may be withdrawn,” the justices ruled. Whether there was or wasn’t a reasonable possibility of this sort of recovery was to be decided in consultation with “the hospital ‘Ethics Committee’ or like body of the institution.”
⁷¹

The Quinlans had won but, as Armstrong said at the press conference, you couldn’t really call being granted permission to watch your daughter die more quickly a victory. In the wake of the ruling, the California legislature began debating a proposed Natural Death Act, which stated, “Every person has the right to die without prolongation of life by medical means.” The National Right to Life Committee lobbied against it; during one committee hearing, a testifier placed on the witness table a copy of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
The sponsor of the bill told the legislature, “Karen Quinlan haunts our dreams.”
⁷²

Karen Ann Quinlan did not die in 1976. Instead of pulling the plug, her doctors slowly weaned her off the respirator. To everyone’s surprise, she was able to breathe on her own. In June 1976, she was moved to the Morris View Nursing Home.
⁷³
No one knew how long she might live. Her parents might have asked to remove her feeding tube; they did not. Every time she got sick—respiratory problems, chiefly—reporters kept a deathwatch. One tried to get into the nursing home disguised as a nun.
⁷⁴
Every day, her father stopped at the nursing home on his way to work, to kiss his daughter good morning, and again on his way home, to kiss her good night. Her mother visited daily, too. Once a week, she brought her parents. Quinlan’s grandmother always whispered, “Hurry up and get better, Karen.”
⁷⁵

The months stretched into years. Karen Ann Quinlan lived through the Reagan revolution of 1980, when evangelicals joined the
pro-life movement and brought the movement’s style, tactics, and assumptions, if not always its agenda, into nearly all of American politics. She lived through the
“Baby Doe” case two years later, when the parents of a baby born with Down syndrome refused to authorize lifesaving surgery for an easily fixed esophageal impairment. The baby starved to death. On the floor of Congress,
Mick Staton, a Republican congressman from West Virginia, said the
doctors’ decision to let the parents refuse surgery had “terrifying similarities to the
Nazi Reich’s brand of eugenics.”
⁷⁶
In the
Washington Post
,
George Will wrote of his own son:

Matters of life and death are not, inherently, partisan. They have been turned to partisan purposes, and that shift has fundamentally altered American political culture. Americans have always fought about rights, but life is different from liberty and property. When politics turns on a right shrouded in the sacred, issues demanding debate become matters inviolable and political conversation is no longer civil, pluralist, and yielding. And when this happens, day after day, year after year, there is no more politics; there’s only one sort of impasse or another.

Karen Ann Quinlan died of pneumonia on June 11, 1985. Her mother was with her, holding, between her hands, her daughter’s hands, as bony as bird claws. Julia Quinlan prayed to the Virgin Mary, “To you I come; before you I stand.” Her daughter took her last breath. The Quinlan family waited five days to tell the press, and asked only to be left alone.
Thomas Trapasso, now a monsignor, celebrated the Mass of
Resurrection at Our Lady of the Lake. And then Karen Ann Quinlan’s body was taken in a hearse, over miles of winding road, to a cemetery called the Gate of Heaven.
⁷⁸

R
obert C. W. Ettinger, who thought death was for chumps, drove a rusty white Chevy Lumina with a bumper sticker on the rear that read, “Choose Life!” When I met him, he was ninety years old, bent and crooked. His face was splotched, his goatee grizzled, his white hair wispy and unkempt. He leaned on a worn wooden cane and wore a thick orthopedic shoe on his left foot; he sometimes covered a short distance without the cane by groping from one object to the next, chair to table, table to doorjamb, like a toddler taking his first steps. His legs were smashed when he was hit by German mortar fire in November 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge. He spent four years in an army hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he had bone grafts and skin grafts; antibiotics saved his life. More recently, he’d undergone angioplasty, cataract surgery, a hemorrhoidectomy, and prostate surgery, twice. That he’d lasted so long was a miracle of science. Actuarially, chances were good that he’d be dying soon. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t afraid of anything except a stroke; although, if the going got much tougher, he said, he’d kill himself. He’d planned that down to the last detail. He had
one concern. “The problem, of course, with suicide,” he told me, “is that if you don’t do it right, you face autopsy. And then you’re no good for freezing.”
¹

Ettinger founded the cryonics movement. Cryonics is what happens when ideas about life and death move from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences, from the past to the future, and get stuck there. Ettinger planned that, when he died, the blood would be washed out of his body, antifreeze would be pumped into his arteries, and holes would be drilled in his skull, after which he would be stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen at 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
²
His mansion of happiness is a freezer. He expected to be defrosted, sometime between fifty and two hundred years after his death, by scientists who will make him young and strong and tireless.
³
When I went out to Michigan to meet Ettinger in 2009, he had already frozen his mother and his two wives, along with ninety-two other people, who were awaiting resurrection inside giant freezers in a building just a few blocks from his house in Clinton Township.
⁴

Clinton Township, population 95,648 at the last census—95,743 if you count the corpses at the Cryonics Institute (“Our patients are not truly dead in any fundamental sense,” said Ettinger)—lies twenty miles northeast of Detroit and just a few miles inland from Lake St. Clair. In 1782, Moravian missionaries pitched camp and named the site New Gnadenhutten, which means “tents of grace,” but they might have called it Stechmückenhutten, “tents of small, nasty flying insects”; they were badly attacked by mosquitoes. The Moravians buried their dead on top of Indian dead. The township is named after New York’s Erie Canal–building governor,
DeWitt Clinton, because easterners began arriving in droves soon after the canal was completed in 1825. Ground was broken for a canal to Kalamazoo in 1838, a year after Michigan entered the union, but the railroad came instead.
⁵
At the Clinton Township Historic Village, which consists of a log cabin, an old Moravian meetinghouse, and a wishing well, the grass was squishy and soggy, as if someone had left the sprinklers on for too long; but it was just the old, abandoned Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal, oozing up. The past has a way of doing that.

There are only three ways to go when you die. You can be buried, burned, or frozen. If there is no
God, said Ettinger, your only chance at an
afterlife is option 3. I decided to take a closer look at options 1 and 2. Driving along
Cass Avenue, I passed the First Presbyterian Church, where a sign out front read,

Down the road, I stopped at Clinton Grove Memorial Park, established in 1855, the oldest burial ground around. A canopy of oaks and elms shelters six thousand nineteenth-century dead. Vacancies remain. A brightly lit neon billboard cycled through three messages:
CREMATION SPACE
$395…
MONUMENTS SOLD HERE … THINK SPRING!