Many would consider that the persistent vegetative state and its management has no place in a book on euthanasia. Certainly the very full medical, ethical and legal debates there have been over the past 17 years about managing vegetative patients, largely conducted in the academic journals, the law courts and public press in the United States, have scarcely made reference to the euthanasia issue. The few commentators who have sought to relate the two issues are those whose objections to letting vegetative patients die seem to be based, at least partly, on the fear that to allow this would be seen as a step towards legitimising euthanasia. In Britain, however, some association between the two issues in the public mind became inevitable when two highly publicised legal cases caught the attention of the media in the same week in 1992. In late September Dr Nigel Cox had been convicted of attempted murder for giving a lethal injection to a pain–wracked patient, but in mid–November the General Medical Council decided not to take any disciplinary action against him after which his employing authority agreed to reinstate him subject to certain conditions. That was the same week that the High Court was hearing the case of Anthony Bland, a young man vegetative for three and a half years for whom a declaration was sought to allow withdrawal of life–sustaining treatment — the first such case to come under legal scrutiny in the UK.