Starting around the nineteenth century, suffering began to be understood as something negative rather than something inevitable and that in some sense made people stronger and more human. The idea was that suffering should be eliminated from the human experience.

This idea plays a very important part in the “logic” of euthanasia. What makes suffering unbearable? What is suffering? How do we measure suffering? The novelist Flannery O’Connor died of Lupus at age thirty-nine. She felt that suffering was part of the human condition.

Listen to the latest podcast discussion on eugenics and euthanasia with Alexander Raikin and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.