Barbara Salisbury began a five-year jail sentence at the weekend for attempted murder in Britain, which means she should be out in about three years - time enough to start the Barbara Salisbury School of Nursing in Dublin, so that her eager young students, with their crisp certificates attesting to their skill with pillows and their surreptitious administration of enough diamorphine to slay a white whale, might be in eager attendance when my turn comes, writes Kevin Myers
In the meantime, I must content myself with making Barbara Salisbury my Nurse of the Year.
Barbara Salisbury was found guilty of attempting to murder terminally ill patients in Leighton Hospital in Crewe. One of the "victims" was Frank Owen, aged 92, He had been "terminally ill" for over three months, and his continued presence in the hospital meant that he continued to monopolise an absolutely vital bed in a critically overcrowded hospital system.
Now it might be argued that, had Frank Owen recovered from his otherwise terminal illness, he would have gone on to live a rich and fulfilling life in his nineties, writing novels and winning Olympic medals in downhill skiing. As it can equally be argued that the government of Sudan should get this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
The truth is that his life, in any meaningful sense, was over. Nothing lay ahead but dependency, degradation and humiliation. His continued hold on life was almost certainly made possible by the unnatural and perverse interventions of medical science. In all previous epochs, he would simply have died at home in his bed, from the numerous ravages of age and decay to which flesh is heir. Eskimos, who prudently would leave the old and weary and dying on an ice-floe, clearly understood these things better then we do. And of course, the wolves, peckish as always, were duly grateful.
Barbara Salisbury is Welsh, but I dare say she has some Eskimo blood in her veins. When she returned from sick leave, she found Frank Owen still in her ward, dying still, but unable to die. She ordered nurses to lie him on his back, so that his lungs would fill up with fluid. Meanwhile, she injected him with diamorphine (heroin), which would spare him any discomfort. His body had so degenerated that his lungs were unable to clear themselves, and he died within minutes.
Another patient, May Taylor (88), was admitted to the hospital after suffering a very severe stroke. She had at best days to live, perhaps hours. Barbara Salisbury wrote in her notes that she was "agitated while turning", which was the pretext for injecting the patient with diamorphine. When another nurse questioned the use of such a powerful drug on such a frail old lady, Barbara Salisbury replied crossly: "If you are not happy, leave it to me. Why prolong the inevitable?"
Why prolong the inevitable indeed? Only a dysfunctional priggishness causes the medical profession to contemplate the doomed in their last hours of torment and then decide to squeeze an extra few hours out of a life which would, unassisted, have long since been forfeit. By such obstinate and posturing sanctimony, the Hippocratic Oath becomes the Hippocratic Curse.
"Thou shalt not kill: but needst not strive/ Officiously to keep alive", observed the Victorian Arthur Hugh Clough. But much of what Western medicine has since sought to achieve is a studied refutation of the latter part of that central wisdom. For letting go is something we must all do sooner or later, and when we are unable to do so, then why not have a Nurse Salisbury sitting at our bedside, gently prising our fingers off the bar?
The truth is that there was no dispute about the nature of Barbara Salisbury's so-called victims. The prosecution told the court that each of her patients was terminally ill, and had only hours or days to live. Even May Taylor's grand-daughter - who, strangely, approved of the prosecution - declared that her grandmother's life had been taken "on the wrong day".
We have permitted science to create life where there would otherwise be none. We have allowed it abolish the laws of Malthus and feed millions. We have beaten disease and routed parasites. We have prolonged life wholly unnaturally, and have come to fetishise every extra breath that is drawn. And in doing so, we have created political and medical cultures which do not allow themselves to proclaim the mercy of death or to celebrate the glory that is mortal deliverance. We conceal from ourselves this central truth of our existence: death at the due time is the greatest victory of our entire lives.
Moreover, there are Nurse Salisburys everywhere who try to find such victories, and there always have been: we can be sure that Shakespeare's Hostess Quickly and Dickens's Mrs Gamp would without hesitation have cut short an expiring tenancy on what had become an unbearable life. We need people like them now even more than the Eskimos need that ice-floe, because we have assembled such complex machinery to keep the undead unnaturally still with us.
Striving officiously to keep alive is now almost the central dogma of hospitals everywhere, and those who should long since have sailed off on the broad and welcoming ocean of death are instead marooned indefinitely in their soiled litters on the quayside. The waters call but, bound by the iron bars of the prison made by modern science, the undead, babbling, witless and incontinent, are unable to leave. The Barbara Salisburys of this world are simply the friendly jailers who try to leave the cell-door ajar.