|
Ian Robert Dowbiggin (born 1952) is a professor in the History department at the University of Prince Edward Island and writer on the history of medicine, in particular topics such as euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. His research and publications have been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Associated Medical Services. In 2011, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. ==Euthanasia== Dowbiggin has written on the history of the euthanasia movement, including ''A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America'' (2003) and ''A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine'' (2005). He links the rise of euthanasia to an intellectual shift that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, away from the moral precepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition.〔 One important cause of this shift was Darwinism, which had questioned the right of the "unfit" – such as the mentally handicapped – to live.〔 Along with other intellectual currents such as social progressivism and Unitarianism, this led physicians and people like the founder of the Euthanasia Society of America, Charles Francis Potter, to accept the practice of euthanasia. According to a review of ''A Concise History of Euthanasia'' by Sandra Woien in the ''American Journal of Bioethics'', Dowbiggin sees euthanasia and eugenics as the inevitable results of abandoning the moral guidance of religion in medicine.〔 Woien found that the book overemphasised the relationship between eugenics and euthanasia, and muddied "important conceptual and practical distinctions", but allowed that it may be "useful in understanding the historical context of euthanasia." The Canadian Historical Association awarded Dowbiggin the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize for ''A Merciful End'', stating that the book "gives a clear and evenly-balanced study of the history of euthanasia in the United States since the latter part of the nineteenth century", and concluded that it overall is a "masterful explanation of the way in which changing social, economic and disease-related factors have affected public interest in euthanasia." Dowbiggin has spoken against euthanasia legislation and said that the Netherlands exists as a "cautionary lesson" for Canada in particular, showing that those places that "take a permissive attitude to assisted suicide keep pushing the boundaries." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ian Dowbiggin」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|