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Ian Dowbiggin. A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine. Critical Issues in History. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. vii + 163 pp. $22.95 (0-7425-3110-4).
This compact volume offers a comprehensive distillation of the history of euthanasia, contextualized in terms of the struggle between organized religion and secular advocacy groups. Unfortunately, when Ian Dowbiggin (an expert on American euthanasia-advocacy groups) treats subjects beyond the range of his earlier scholarship, he often introduces distortions that undermine the value of the book.
Consider Dowbiggin's presentation of the origins of the modern concept of euthanasia. In 1605 Francis Bacon introduced the expression "outward Euthanasia" to designate what we would today characterize as end-of-life palliative care. Having correctly noted this point, Dowbiggin misreads a line from Bacon, interpreting the statement that seventeenth-century physicians "make a kind of scruple and religion to stay with the patient after he is given up" (p. 23) as asserting that "physicians . . . tended to...