A murderous ageism? Age, death and Dr. Shipman

Abstract

This paper examines the case of Dr. Harold Shipman, the English family doctor who is judged to have murdered over two hundred of his patients during his professional career. As nearly all of his victims were old age pensioners, his case has raised questions about the role of ageism in his committing these murders and/or in his getting away with them for so long. This paper argues that there was nothing ‘ageist’ about his clinical practice, nor is there reason to believe that he killed old people to ‘assist’ their dying (whether out of kindness or impatience). However, it was under cover of the ‘naturalness’ of death, that Shipman committed so many of his preventable murders. Besides any significance for understanding individual psychopathology, Shipman's case highlights how the (medico-legal) distinction between ‘unlawful’ and ‘natural’ deaths merges with the (bio-medical) distinction between ‘preventable’ and ‘unpreventable’ deaths to create a normative account of “the good death”.