Short abstract
French oncologist and one time government minister known for his outspoken views on patient care
Léon Schwartzenberg was a leading French cancer specialist. But he was more widely known as a radical intellectual and servant of social justice. For a few days in 1988 he was briefly a government minister. Thereafter he became increasingly outspoken, the champion of a range of issues—drug taking, the welfare of homeless people, and the right to die. He also served as a vociferous and occasionally unpredictable Socialist member of the European Parliament.
Figure 1.
Credit: SIPA/REX
He was in favour of providing syringes to drug users and of testing pregnant women for HIV. Twice he was thrown out of the medical union L'Ordre des Médecins, but he was unrepentant. "They are rubbish, absolutely worthless," he declared during a public debate. In an attempt to challenge the government on its drug laws, he was one of 200 French artists, intellectuals, and politicians who signed a petition reading: "At one time or another in my life I have taken narcotics. I know that by publicly admitting to being a drug user I face prosecution. I accept this risk." Schwartzenberg was never arrested.
He protested with the poor and dispossessed, taking to the streets with striking nurses and joining the "sans papiers" (illegal immigrants) when they occupied the Church of St Bernard in Paris in 1996. The previous year he was a member of the group of intellectuals who set up Droits Devant! ("Rights first"), a project intended to affirm poor and homeless people's rights not just to a roof over their heads, but to what the organisers described as "health, work, citizenship, and education." The French authorities decreed it a security risk, and Schwartzenberg and his colleagues—including the geneticist Albert Jacquard and the liberal bishop Monsignor Jacques Gaillot—were met by riot police.
Nevertheless, Schwartzenberg, who lost two brothers in Mauthausen concentration camp during the second world war, had some respectability in the eyes of the establishment. He had been the surgeon to whom the French government turned in 1990 when Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief known as the "butcher of Lyons," was suspected of having leukaemia.
But by this time Schwartzenberg had been well used to courting controversy. His book Changer Le Mort was published in 1977 (co-authored by Pierre Viansson-Ponte, who died shortly afterwards). It espoused Schwartzenberg's view that the dying should be helped to die. However, he also insisted that he would draw the line at euthanasia. "Euthanasia is ugly," he wrote in 1976. "But...maintaining the life of a dying person who is suffering without hope, is vile."
Honesty was all he was seeking: honesty between doctor and patient. "It is hypocritical to decide to tell AIDS victims that they are HIV positive and to deny the same knowledge to others who are fatally ill," he said in a Guardian interview in 1994. "I knew of one patient who fought with General Leclerc in the second world war. At 76, he was diagnosed as having lung cancer. His wife pleaded: `Don't tell him. He's thin, he's worn out. He won't be able to take it.' But I think if a man has risked his life in a war, we don't have the right to deny him the knowledge that he is soon going to die." According to Schwartzenberg's account, the patient summoned his relatives from across the world for one last birthday party, leaving his grandchildren with happy last memories of their elderly grandfather.
As an MEP, Schwartzenberg shocked the European Parliament with tales of children in developing countries being mutilated or murdered to obtain transplant organs for export to rich countries. It was, he said, a "crime against humanity in which children were sacrificed at the altar of the rich." His aim was a ban on trading in transplant organs within the European Union, and a total ban on the import of organs whose origin could not be verified.
His country's role in sanctions against Iraq also attracted his scorn. Writing in Le Monde in 1998, Schwartzenberg reported that "the number of patients stricken with cancer has increased six-fold since the [1991] war" because of sanctions. "The drugs needed for their treatment are for the most part lacking. As to surgical strikes, with which the American president and Congress regularly threaten Iraq, they can reassure themselves that these strikes take place daily and with precision on children uncared for, on adults denied treatment."
Léon Schwartzenberg was born in Paris, but, being Jewish, in 1942 he and his family fled to Toulouse to avoid the Nazi occupation. Despite this escape to freedom, his medical studies were halted by L'Ordre des Médecins on account of his race. He joined the Resistance, helping to smuggle allied airmen from France to Spain. After the war he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and resumed his studies in Paris, specialising in oncology and working at the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris and later the Gustave-Roussy Institute in Villejuif.
When Michel Rocard was appointed French prime minister in 1988, he asked Schwartzenberg to join his government and to take responsibility for social affairs. But within nine days they had fallen out, and Rocard and Schwartzenberg parted company.
Schwartzenberg leaves a wife, the actress Marina Vlady, and their children.
Léon Schwartzenberg, French cancer specialist and politician (b Paris 1923), died in Paris on 14 October 2003.