Editor’s note: We are pleased to present this excerpt from the new book by Professor Richard Weikart, Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (Discovery Institute Press).

One secularizing influence — Darwinism — played a particularly powerful role in helping erode the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic. Ian Dowbiggin highlights this point by stating, “The most pivotal turning point in the early history of the euthanasia movement was the coming of Darwinism to America.” Nick Kemp, who has written the best book on the history of the British euthanasia movement, concurs with Dowbiggin. He writes, “While we should be wary of depicting Darwin as the man responsible for ushering in a secular age we should be similarly cautious of underestimating the importance of evolutionary thought in relation to the questioning of the sanctity of human life.” Indeed, Dowbiggin and Kemp both portray the pioneers of the euthanasia movement as mostly atheists, agnostics, or something similar, whose ideas were heavily influenced by Darwin’s theory of biological evolution.

Secularizing Tendencies

In Germany the euthanasia movement arose out of similar secularizing tendencies. One of the leading experts on the euthanasia debates in Germany before World War I, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, explains, “By giving up the conception of the divine image of humans under the influence of the Darwinian theory, human life became a piece of property, which — in contrast to the idea of a natural right to life — could be weighed against other pieces of property.” Not only did most Darwinists see humans as just another animal, but many believed that morality had evolved, undermining any objective moral standards, such as Judeo-Christian ethics. Most Darwinists in the late nineteenth century also embraced human inequality, believing that some races and individuals were more evolved than others and, therefore, more valuable than others. Many races and individuals they deemed “unfit,” and they considered death a positive force that would cull these “inferior” people from the human race, leaving the “fit” to propagate the species. Most early euthanasia proponents saw killing people with disabilities as just a natural, normal part of the Darwinian struggle for existence.

Another powerful influence on the early euthanasia movement was eugenics ideology, which emerged first in the 1860s under the leadership of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. While reading Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species, it occurred to Galton that from generation to generation humans could vary biologically — moving in what he considered either a positive or a negative direction. He then proposed that we should consciously aim at improving the human species by fostering the reproduction of those with “good” traits, while restricting the reproduction of those who are allegedly inferior biological specimens. Galton did not suggest killing anyone to improve the species, and not all eugenics proponents agreed with euthanasia as a proper eugenics measure. However, the eugenics movement’s tendency to value only some human lives — rather than all human lives — together with its negative attitudes toward people with disabilities, helped spawn attitudes congenial to euthanasia. After all, based on their Darwinian vision of nature, most eugenicists saw death as a beneficent force that rids the world of those who are inferior. The eugenics movement gained many adherents in the early twentieth century, especially among psychiatrists and physicians, many of whom regarded mental illnesses as hereditary and incurable. Some of the more radical members of the eugenics movement played leading roles in the euthanasia movement as well.

The Opening Salvo

In the Anglo-American world, Samuel Williams, an obscure British schoolteacher, fired the opening salvo in the public debate over euthanasia when he published a controversial article in the Essays of the Birmingham Speculative Club in 1870. Though this journal was usually not very widely read, his essay must have touched a nerve, for it generated many responses — both positive and negative — in more influential venues. Williams’s essay also appeared as a pamphlet titled Euthanasia, and it sold so well that it went through four editions by 1873. Williams proposed in his essay that physicians be allowed to administer a lethal dose of medicine to patients with incurable, painful illnesses, but only if the patients desired it. Williams dismissed the traditional Christian idea that all human life has value, but instead maintained that “it may well be doubted if life have any sacredness about it, apart from the use to be made of it by its possessor.” He stressed the importance of understanding the Darwinian struggle for existence among humans, and he argued that those “who perished due to illness, disability, or old age were merely succumbing to the fate of all ‘weak’ creatures who lost out to the ‘hardiest’ individuals.” Invoking the Darwinian struggle for existence as a justification for getting rid of the sick and weak would be a common refrain by euthanasia proponents in the following decades.

One of the most prominent responses to Williams’s essay came from Lionel Tollemache, who published “The Cure for Incurables” in 1873 in Fortnightly Review, an influential publication. Tollemache agreed with Williams. He thought the time had come for people to toss the “sanctity of life” idea on the ash-heap of history. He shared the advice of the ancient Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius, who encouraged the elderly to welcome death, because nature could recycle their material to fashion younger bodies. He also invoked more modern ideas:

And, in a somewhat similar spirit, modern science informs us that in an overcrowded population there is a sharp struggle for existence: so that an unhealthy, unhappy, and useless man is in a manner hustling out of being, or at least out of the means of enjoyment, someone who would probably be happier, healthier, and more useful than himself.

Thus Tollemache invoked Darwinian biology to defend euthanasia. He also seemed to be shaming anyone who would be selfish enough to continue living when they are no longer “useful.” This theme of a person’s “usefulness” continues to surface in today’s discussions of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Extremely Radical Ideas

Williams and Tollemache, however, faced many critics. Their ideas were considered extremely radical in the 1870s, and most of the articles published in the ensuing debate rejected their position. Certainly most of the religious leaders in Europe and the United States rejected their brand of euthanasia. The medical community was not very receptive, either, as most still faithfully adhered to the Hippocratic Oath. In 1873 the famous British anthropologist Edward Tylor joined the debate by attacking Williams’s position, arguing that killing the elderly was a characteristic of primitive societies. He believed that civilized societies had advanced beyond this practice, and he portrayed euthanasia as a relapse into barbarism.

A couple of decades later, in 1894, the British philosopher F. H. Bradley published an essay in the International Journal of Ethics promoting involuntary euthanasia as a new form of punishment for those deemed biologically inferior. Bradley also referred to this “punishment” as “social surgery” or “moral surgery.” Bradley claimed that he derived this new vision of punishment directly from Darwinian processes, since evolution produces improvement through selecting individuals with favorable traits and eliminating those with unfavorable characteristics. Bradley explained, “The right and the duty of the organism to suppress its undesirable growths is the idea of punishment directly suggested by Darwinism.” He overtly rejected the notion of individual rights, subordinating them to the interests of the community. He stated, “Assuming here that the welfare of the community is the highest end and law, and assuming that selection among varieties is necessary to that welfare, I intend briefly to apply these ideas to the subject of punishment.” He remonstrated against the Christian doctrine of the sacredness of human life and insisted that humans are not equally valuable. Thus, in his view, “social amputation,” as he also called it, should be directed against people with disabilities. “Surely, then, the least cruel, the most merciful course of conduct — the best means in our power to diminish suffering — is to regard nothing but the conditions of general advantage” of the community, he argued. “And as to these conditions Darwinism offers a positive doctrine. It teaches, in a word, the necessity of constant selection…. That way consists in the destruction of worse varieties, or at least in the hindrance of such varieties from reproduction.”

In closing the essay, Bradley rejected the suggestion that these “worse varieties” of humans should be confined (as in asylums), since “it seems wrong to load the community with the useless burden of these lives.” He expressed contempt for those with mental illnesses, remarking, “I am disgusted at the inviolable sanctity of the noxious lunatic.” Rather, he proposed that we kill them: “But still our remedy would have to utter and to enforce this sentence, ‘You and you are dangerous specimens; you must depart in peace.’” Bradley’s focus was thus on involuntary euthanasia for those that society deems inferior biologically.

Haeckel Promotes Infanticide

The same year that Williams published his controversial essay in Britain in support of assisted suicide, the Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel became one of the first German intellectuals to seriously propose infanticide for babies with serious disabilities. In the second edition of his book on evolutionary theory, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural History of Creation), Haeckel did not overtly advocate infanticide, but he did promote it in a back-handed way: “If someone would dare to make the suggestion, according to the example of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill immediately after birth the miserable and infirm children, to whom can be prophesied with assurance a sickly life, instead of preserving them to their own harm and the detriment of the whole community,” he remarked, “our whole so-called ‘humane civilization’ would erupt in a cry of indignation.” Haeckel, both in this book and many subsequent works, stressed that humans are not equal, and this inegalitarian attitude would become widespread in the eugenics and euthanasia movements.

In his 1904 book, Lebenswunder (The Wonders of Life), Haeckel admitted that his 1870 comments about Spartan infanticide were indeed intended to encourage the practice in modern society. To justify this position he appealed to his theory of evolutionary recapitulation, which claimed that as organisms develop embryologically, they go through the stages of their evolutionary history. Thus, when humans were conceived as single cells, they were equivalent to protozoa, and as they developed further, they would traverse a fish stage, a reptile stage, and so forth. Even a newborn infant, Haeckel thought, was at a lower evolutionary stage than an adult human. Thus a baby’s life is no more valuable than some kind of animal in the infant’s evolutionary ancestry. Haeckel used similar reasoning to devalue the lives of people with mental disabilities. He argued that people with hereditary mental illnesses had not developed beyond an animalistic stage, so killing them was not morally problematic. He condemned the idea that we should always preserve human life, “even if it is completely worthless.” He lamented that his society was wasting its resources by keeping thousands of mentally ill people alive. Better, he insisted, to give them a shot of morphine and end their lives. He suggested that the decision for these acts of involuntary euthanasia should rest with a commission of physicians.

In that book Haeckel also advocated assisted suicide for those with incurable illnesses. He rejected the idea that suicide is “self-murder,” which is the literal translation of the German word; he preferred the term “self-redemption.” He pointed out that we kill animals in misery, so he thought we should do the same for humans who want our assistance in ending their lives. He stated, “Likewise we have the right, or if one will, the duty, to prepare an end for the dire sorrow of our fellow human being, if severe illness without hope of improvement makes their existence unbearable and if they ask us for ‘redemption from evil.’”

Haeckel thus promoted voluntary euthanasia for those with incurable, painful illnesses, and involuntary euthanasia for those with hereditary mental illnesses.

We, the Superior

Another German intellectual contributing to the emerging euthanasia movement was the death-of-God philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

All scholarly references may be found in Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing.