Timothy E. Quill

Timothy E. Quill is an American physician specialising in palliative care at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York. He is also a board member of the Death with Dignity National Center in Portland, Oregon. Quill was the lead plaintiff in a case that eventually reached the Supreme Court of the United States in 1997, Vacco v. Quill, in which the Court decided that a state law against physician-assisted suicide was constitutional. Quill earned his undergraduate degree from Amherst College in 1971, and his M.D. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1976. In 1991, Quill published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine describing 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 with an extensive medical history including vaginal cancer, alcoholism and other issues was diagnosed with leukemia but refused chemotherapy.