‘A Prey on Normal People’: C. Killick Millard and the Euthanasia Movement in Great Britain, 1930–55
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Few issues in medicine and society today are more controversial than euthanasia, the term derived from the Greek word for ‘easy death’ and often called ‘mercy-killing’. Current debates raise questions about the past and what euthanasia has meant to earlier generations. The most infamous example of a state euthanasia programme occurred between 1939 and 1945 in nazi Germany when thousands of handicapped men, women and children were murdered. But little is known about the history of Anglo-American euthanasia. This article, based on an examination of documents from a variety of archival collections in England and the USA, explores the early history of the unsuccessful movement to legalize euthanasia in Great Britain, as embodied in the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society (VELS). By focusing on the career of C. Killick Millard (1870–1952), the founder of the VELS, this article argues that although the VELS tried to convince the public that it sought the legalization of only mercy-killing with consent, there was a tendency within the VELS to obscure the distinctions between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. There is even some evidence of VELS sympathy for nazi euthanasia. At the same time, VELS members also tended to be involved in the eugenics, birth control and public health movements or belong to liberal religious groups like the Unitarians, or they were physicians radicalized by the experience of watching patients die in protracted agony. It is this complex constellation of motives — some murky and some indisputably humane — that warrants attention nowadays, at a time when courts and legislatures are being asked to rule on such literally life and death issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".