Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 125
depart from the format and principles of Percival. That ethical code was premised upon
deeply Christian values. For Percival the physician’s main responsibility was to
administer curative or at least palliative care: in his words, to “be the minister of hope
and comfort to the sick; that by such cordials to the drooping spirit, he may smooth the
bed of death; revive expiring life; and counteract the depressing influence of those
maladies, which rob the philosopher of fortitude, and the Christian of consolation”
(Medical Ethics, 31-2). Calling suicide a “crime, which in atrocity exceeds every other”
(75), Percival and the AMA had no place in their code for physician-assisted suicide.
Percival and the overwhelmingly Christian AMA of 1847 also understood what a later
Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, had to remind his twentieth century readers of, namely,
that although we may face it with fear and loathing, pain and suffering can have
immediate and transcendent purposes (see The Problem of Pain, 1940). Dowbiggin’s
highly cautionary tale of euthanasia would have been further delineated and supported by
inclusion of Percival’s Medical Ethics and its importance in American medical history;
but as it is, his book remains a powerful study of a nearly timeless and—as we have seen
in the recent Terri Schiavo case—timely contemporary topic.
It should be said that Dowbiggin has a competitor: Shai J. Lavi’s Modern Art of
Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States (2005). Lavi’s book offers some of
its own warnings concerning euthanasia. Unlike Dowbiggin, however, Lavi is at times
equivocal and murky in his assessments; and his use of Methodist deathbed “biographies”
as testimonies of a “good death” is too narrow and limited in scope to adequately
contextualize the topic.
For a well-written and unambiguous historical account of euthanasia Dowbiggin’s
deceptively brief but immensely informative monograph is the clear winner. It is not only
highly recommended for every academician interested in this question, it would also
make an excellent supplemental reading for courses on contemporary issues, philosophy,
medical ethics, social and religious history, and the history of ideas. This book should be
on every scholar’s reading list, on many instructors’ syllabi, and on all academic library
shelves.
Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, Pascale
Ghazaleh, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2004. Pp. 327. $23.95.
Reviewed by Glenn E. Sanders, Oklahoma Baptist University
One recent, clear indicator of Gilles Kepel’s prominence as a scholar and public
intellectual is his participation in the conference “Islam in a Pluralistic World,” sponsored
by the Oesterreichische Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall and held in Vienna in
mid-November 2005. He was one of two western scholars (the other being Jack Goody of