| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. By Ian Dowbiggin. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxii, 250 pp. $28.00, ISBN 0-19-515443-6.)
A Merciful End provides an excellent history of the American euthanasia movement since the late nineteenth century, when a few reformers first challenged the traditional Judeo-Christian ethics of death and dying and when euthanasia acquired its modern connotation as mercy killing.	1
Ian Dowbiggin shows that from its origins the euthanasia movement has been saddled with an often unacknowledged tension between the search for scientific social control and the quest for personal autonomy. He traces the shifting fortunes of the movement and the permutations of this ideological tension in chapters covering 1920–1940 ("Breakthrough"), 1940–1960 ("Stalemate"), 1960–1975 ("Riding a Great Wave"), and 1975–1990 ("Not That Simple").	. . .

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