From Cincinnati Post 30 January 1906
In 1906, Cincinnatians were forgiven if they crossed to the other side of the street when they saw Anna S. Hall walking toward them. The daughter of a famous explorer, Miss Hall was known as an outspoken advocate for merciful deaths, and she carried the tools to perform euthanasia wherever she went.
According to psychiatrist Jacob M. Appel, in a paper titled “A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906” [Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Fall 2004]:
“The driving force behind placing the legalization of euthanasia on the public agenda in the first years of the twentieth century was Cincinnati heiress Anna S. Hall. Miss Hall’s father, the noted Arctic explorer Charles F. Hall, had disappeared on his third government-sponsored expedition in 1879; when her mother died in 1901 after a ‘harrowing’ eighteen-month battle with liver cancer, Miss Hall found herself in possession of a small fortune – what remained of the $25,000 awarded to her family upon her father’s demise – and a desire to make certain nobody else would have to endure suffering to the degree that her mother had.”
Indeed, on January 24, 1906, Miss Hall prevailed upon Democratic Representative Henry T. Hunt (later mayor of Cincinnati) to introduce a bill she drafted to the Ohio General Assembly. If passed into law, Hall’s act would have allowed incurably ill patients to request a merciful death and would have required attending physicians to consider the request and provide such a death if they agreed.
Hunt asked only that the bill “not be treated lightly” and be “given fair consideration” but, as soon as he presented the matter, a delegate from East Liverpool leapt to his feet to denounce the measure as “an insult to the intelligence of every member of the house.” The chamber erupted into laughter, but that was widely interpreted not as derision for the proposed bill, but skepticism that it was even possible to insult the intelligence of the Ohio General Assembly. Miss Hall was present that day in the gallery and returned the next day to testify. As reported in the Ohio State Journal [January 25, 1906], Miss Hall claimed her proposal had nothing to do with cruelty or murder:
“I belong to the Audubon Society and to the Humane Society at home. I can’t bear to see any person or animal suffer. Why, I wouldn’t even use a piece of flypaper in my house. I think it is cruel to the flies. Didn’t you ever notice the distress of the fly when it was caught on the paper? I believe in soothing all agony. Isn’t that as much the mission of a physician as anything else?”
From Evansville (Indiana) Press, 25 February 1907
Although her bill died in committee, it inspired several other similar bills in other state legislatures. Although none were passed into law, they generated widespread debate, and Miss Hall soon earned a national reputation.
That reputation dragged Miss Hall back into the spotlight two years later when a Cleveland musician named Charles Kuppe chloroformed his “imbecile” daughter Amalia and then hanged himself. Kuppe left a note claiming he committed the deed for fear he would die and leave his daughter as a burden on her mother or, worse, see her institutionalized.
Newspapers around the country chased down Miss Hall for reaction. She said her only disappointment was that Kuppe, by committing suicide, eliminated a judicial test of her beliefs. The Cincinnati Post [May 7, 1908] published a point-counterpoint article with Kuppe’s widow, Dorette, strongly disagreeing with Miss Hall’s position. In her statement, Miss Hall defended the mercy killing.
“Charles Kuppe, of Cleveland, whose tragic end touches sympathetic hearts, loved the unfortunate daughter to whom parents had ministered for more than a quarter of a century. Let not the world condemn the father’s act.”
Mrs. Kuppe would have none of that, in her riposte, she claimed:
“I am a mother. And the pain is all the greater because that poor child was as much entitled to life as the most perfect person. Her helplessness made her dearer to me even than if she had been like other children.”
Interestingly, as Jacob Appel noted in his scholarly paper, many practicing doctors at the time commented that, although they were personally opposed to euthanasia and believed it should remain illegal, they all knew of medical colleagues who had ended a patient’s life when they believed any hope for recovery had been lost.
The Post [January 30, 1906] went out to St. Francis Hospital in Lick Run to look for other incurables to inquire whether they would be interested in euthanasia as a way out of their condition. Every last patient was strongly opposed to Miss Hall’s proposal. John Foley, suffering from tuberculosis and hospitalized for 14 years, provided a typical response:
“Chloroform me! Well, I should say not! I’m not a sick cat, if I am in a hospital. A live man is better than a dead one any day. You talk to any of these fellows here and see if they want to be chloroformed. A man may groan and say, ‘I wish I was dead,’ but he changes his mind when the time comes.”
Miss Hall remained the go-to source for comment on mercy killing in 1911 when two elderly Shakers chloroformed an ill and elderly resident of their community. She fired off a telegram in defense of the Shakers to the judge handling their arraignment in Kissimmee, Florida.
So committed to her position was Miss Hall, that she carried a sort of euthanasia kit with her and occasionally visited people in extreme suffering, offering the possibility of painless surcease. She told the Cincinnati Post [April 4, 1907]:
“I always carry a bottle of chloroform with me when I travel. It was given to me by a physician in sympathy with my beliefs, with instructions as to its use. I have never had it open. Should an accident occur I should give enough to make the sufferer insensible to pain until medical aid arrived.”
Anna S. Hall died in 1926 and left the bulk of her estate to the Smithsonian Institution to create a research fund in honor of her father who, ironically enough, was apparently poisoned by his own crew.
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