At Vassar College, in the 1980s, the argument was usually framed with a thought-experiment: Imagine that you wake up in a hospital bed, hooked up to a machine and soon realize that if you disconnect yourself from the machine, the person in the next bed will die.
He was confined to a bed in the living room and was in pain, but had expressed no desire to die or to have anyone help him end his life, the jury heard.