Assisted dying in Germany in 1906

I came across the simple and moving account below of how a German doctor organised assisted dying for his mother whom he loved greatly in “The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History” by Thomas Harding. The doctor was Dr Alfred Alexander, a Jew who had “converted” to Christianity in order to take up a prominent university position. Bella his mother was 51, and when he visited her he was “shocked by her condition: her breaths came in short gulps, her chest was gripped by pain, and she was profoundly weak.” As he writes, Dr Guntzberg, the family doctor, was shocked by the suggestion of assisting Bella’s death, but a colleague, Julius Kahn, gave her the morphine. The act was, of course, illegal and against the doctors’ professional code, but the context, which Harding explains, is interesting. It was two months earlier that the first ever bill legalising assisted dying was presented to the Oregon legislature leading to worldwide condemnation.…