The hospitals are coming out of the closet! It is an event of the first importance that responsible administrators at two great hospitals — independently, I believe — should promulgate and discuss publicly explicit policies about the deliberate withdrawal or non application of life-prolonging measures. That such measures are in fact regularly withheld or withdrawn is an open secret, but the course of decision and the testimony in the Quinlan case show how wary the medical profession can be when the spotlight of publicity illuminates its practices. That is why the Massachusetts General Hospital (Pontoppidan et al., page 362) and . . .