Law Commons^™

Cancer And The Constitution: Choice At Life's End, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

J. M. Coetzee's violent, anti-apartheid Age of Iron, a novel the Wall Street Journal termed “a fierce pageant of modern South Africa,” is written as a letter by a retired classics professor, Mrs. Curren, to her daughter, who lives in the United States. Mrs. Curren is dying of cancer, and her daughter advises her to come to the United States for treatment. She replies, “I can't afford to die in America. . . . No one can, except Americans.” Dying of cancer has been considered a “hard death” for at least a century, unproven and even quack remedies have been …