Karen Ann Quinlan

So I had that story that I had been told from the age of recognizing a story for a story.

And so that book and the fact that I was a 10-minute walk from the train station to go to a meeting, a search meeting in New York City, that galvanized me that's one thing the other thing that happened at that same time was that a woman a young woman who was like in her early 20s karen ann quinlan who lived in this area um i think she overdosed i think she was she was comatose for a long time and her story was repeatedly brought up in the papers and she had been adopted and and i thought um I thought, that's terrible because there are probably dozens of women who are saying to themselves, is this my daughter? Because they never published her date of birth.

They never published her age.

But even if they gave everybody within a one-year time frame, I just thought that really hit me hard.

Then there it gives background.

They talk about Karen Ann Quinlan.

They talk about Dr. Kevorkian.

We're going to skip over that, and then we're just going to jump right to political action based upon...

Yeah, I do, too.

That was kind of in the news and everything.

And then Karen Ann Quinlan, I just the name is about all I remember.

I don't remember the details of the case, but but I don't remember a lot of talk about it after Kevorkian, frankly.

After I got my PhD, I got a job at St. Clair's Mental Health Center in Denville, which was close to where I was living.

And as an aside, I don't know how many people remember Karen Quinlan.

who was a young person who had, I think it was a drug overdose, and she was comatose.

And that was the first case that made medical ethics

a

headline.

Yeah, it was Karen Quinlan.

Ah, yes.

As a neurologist, palliative care physician, and ethicist, this has always intrigued me.

Um, and, um, you know, more than fifty years ago, um, bioethics started with this case of Karen Ann Quinlan, uh, that some of you may know.

So, um, it's really something that sort of accompanied, uh, uh, bioethics since the beginning.

I'd like to start my lecture with a case that I, um, experienced myself in clinical ethics consultation at the University Hospital Lausanne, where I work.

Then we had the PAC tube that actually allowed these patients to live on for many, many years, um, with artificial nutrition and hydration.

And this is why in nineteen seventy-two, again, Fred Plum and, uh, Brian Jennett, for the first time, defined this term, um, the vegetative state, or at the time, the persistent vegetative state, uh, really sort of, um, as a situation where, uh, there are vegetative, um, functions still present, um, but higher cognitive functions irreversibly damaged.

Uh, and then was the famous case of Karen Ann Quinlan already in seventy-five.

Um, many years later, um, people recognized that there's also an intermediate, uh, diagnostic entity that's called minimally conscious state, and later it has been subdivided into MCS plus and minus, uh, where, uh, we know that the person is not, uh, doesn't have some kind of functional communication, but still signs of awareness, signs of consciousness, at least some signs of, um, responses, motor response or eye responses.