IAN DOWBIGGIN. A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine. (Critical Issues in History.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2005. Pp. vii, 163. $22.95
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ian Dowbiggin here covers much the same ground as he does in his more extended and scholarly A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (2003). This book, as part of Rowman and Littlefield's “Critical Issues in History,” certainly lives up to the first two words in that series' title. The author is an avowed partisan as an outspoken radio and television commentator and an active member of Canada's Pro-Life movement. His book is clearly intended to influence the debate that will surely intensify in the United States. Academic readers may find little new in this study, largely confined to the Western world, but despite its bias and certain flaws it does serve as a useful, clearly written primer on an issue of increasing import. “Euthanasia” in Greek means simply “good death,” and in this original sense it seems ever harder to achieve naturally, as an aging population, increasingly prone to illnesses such as cancer, inevitably multiplies demands to short-circuit the pain. But while this demographic fact, plus advances in medical technology, have made assisted suicide an issue as never before, Dowbiggin amply demonstrates his second most important point (following only the need to condemn it on moral grounds), which is that most of the debating points are ancient ones, and that history is essential to understanding them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".