Court Intervention and the Diminution of Patients' Rights: The Case of Brother Joseph Fox

Abstract

Quinlan, Saikewicz, Spring, Fox — names announced in headlines and flashed on TV screens — were patients whose terminal illnesses were removed from the privacy of the family and made the subject matter of protracted legal battles. Their cases raise anew the question of the court's role in termination of life-supporting treatments. The most recent of these cases, that of Brother Joseph Fox, is one of the most unsettling.Fox was an 83-year-old religious brother from Chaminade High School in Mineola, N.Y., who entered Nassau Hospital for a routine hernia operation. During the course of that operation, he had severe . . .