Timothy E. Quill

Dr Timothy E. Quill is an American doctor specialising in palliative care at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York.

In 1991, he published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine which describes how he assisted in the suicide of Patricia Diane Trumbull, a 45-year-old leukemia patient referred to in the article as "Diane". The report describes how Patricia, a long-time patient of Quill's, refused chemotherapy and shortly thereafter decided that she wanted to kill herself rather than have a "lingering death". Quill describes in the article how he referred her to the Hemlock Society and a week later she requested barbituates to help with "insomnia". After she later took the barbituates and died, her husband reported the death to Quill, and he reported the cause of death as acute leukemia but left off mention of the suicide in reporting it to the medical examiner. When interviewed by the New York Times in 1991, Quill stated that he had not helped anyone else to die before or since. No charges or indictments were brought against Quill. The publication of this story has been considered to have "made history" and to have "stunned the medical community".

Quill has subsequently been active in arguing for legalization of physician-assisted suicide, including during the controversial trials of Jack Kevorkian, and has argued against the principle of double effect in bioethics.