| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ian Dowbiggin. A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xix, 250. $28.00.
I do not know who gave this book its title, but I doubt it was the author. As Ian Dowbiggin tells the story, providing "a merciful end" for suffering patients is at best a secondary motive of the euthanasia movement in modern America. Instead, he presents evidence of deep Social Darwinian and eugenic currents. Even for those leaders of the movement whose concerns center on the suffering patient rather than on society, Dowbiggin suggests that the fruit of their labor is infected by mistaken judgment and shortsightedness.	1
Euthanasia has deep roots in Western culture, but Dowbiggin chooses to begin his account at the turn of the last century during the heyday of Social Darwinism and the dawn of eugenics. This choice sets the stage for all that follows. Modernity is largely a product of Darwinism (or vice versa), and Dowbiggin depicts the utilitarian, anticlerical, pervasively Darwinian euthanasia movement as an archetypical manifestation of the modern reform impulse. Fittingly, the movement begins in America with champions like Robert Ingersoll, Felix Adler, William Robinson, Jack London, and Clarence Darrow. America's failure to embrace their arguments for euthanasia even after a century reflects a cultural hesitancy to accept the full implications of modernity, this account suggests. Perhaps there is some sentiment and superstition left in us, at least when we confront death. The rational end for the dying and the defective is euthanasia, its champions argue.	. . .

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