Assisted death: a basic right or a threat to the principal purpose of medicine?

There is much debate in the UK and abroad around whether the law should be changed to license doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to assist terminally ill patients to commit suicide. Here, Sir Graeme Catto argues that terminally ill mentally competent adults should be able to choose the time and place of their death. Opposing him, Baroness Ilora Finlay argues that both the Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill and Lord Falconer’s private member’s bill in the House of Lords endanger patients’ safety and require doctors to assess patients against criteria that cannot be verified.

Plague, pox and the physician in Aberdeen, 1495–1516

This article discusses responses to disease in Aberdeen during a formative period in the provision of healthcare within the city. The foundation of King’s College was followed, in 1497, by the establishment of the first royally endowed university Chair of Medicine in the British Isles, and its first incumbent, James Cumming, was employed by the local government as the first city doctor in 1503.