"Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian dies at age 83
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/us/04kevorkian.html

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the central figure in the tumultuous national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died Friday in a Michigan hospital. He was 83 and lived in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

The cause of his death was not immediately known, but local media reported that he had suffered from kidney and respiratory problems and that his condition had been worsening in recent days. His death was confirmed by Geoffrey Feiger, the lawyer who represented him during several of his trials in the 1990s.

Dr. Kevorkian, a medical pathologist, challenged social taboos about disease and dying, willfully defied prosecutors and the courts, actively sought national celebrity, and spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of the more than 100 terminally ill patients whose lives he helped end.

From June 1990, when he assisted in the first suicide, until March 1999, when he was sentenced to serve 10 to 25 years in a maximum security prison, Dr. Kevorkian was a controversial figure. But his critics and supporters generally agree on this: As a result of his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die, hospice care has boomed in the United States, and physicians have become more sympathetic to their pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it.

In 1997, Oregon became the first state to enact a statute making it legal for physicians to prescribe lethal medications to help terminally ill patients end their lives. In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found that Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act protected a legitimate medical practice.

During the nine years between the law’s passage and the court’s ruling, Dr. Kevorkian’s confrontational strategy consumed thousands of column inches in national newspapers, graced the covers of national magazines and drew the attention of “60 Minutes” and other television news programs. His nickname, Dr. Death, and his self-made suicide machine, which he variously called the “Mercitron” or the “Thanatron,” became fodder for late-night television comedians.

Given his obdurate public persona and his delight in flaying medical critics as “hypocritic oafs,” Dr. Kevorkian invited and reveled in the public’s attention, regardless of its sting.

The American Medical Association in 1995 called him “a reckless instrument of death” who “poses a great threat to the public.”

Diane Coleman, the founder of Not Dead Yet, a right-to-life advocacy group that once picketed Dr. Kevorkian’s home in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, attacked his approach. “It’s the ultimate form of discrimination to offer people with disabilities help to die,” she said, “without having offered real options to live."

But Jack Lessenberry, a prominent Michigan journalist who closely covered Dr. Kevorkian’s one-man campaign, said: “Jack Kevorkian, faults and all, was a major force for good in this society. He forced us to pay attention to one of the biggest elephants in society’s living room: the fact that today vast numbers of people are alive who would rather be dead, who have lives not worth living.”

In the late 1980s, after an undistinguished career in medicine and an unsuccessful try at a career in the arts, Dr. Kevorkian rediscovered the fascination with death, not as a private event but as a focus of public policy, that had marked his early years in medicine.

As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, where he graduated in 1952, and later as a resident at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Dr. Kevorkian proposed giving murderers condemned to die the option of being executed with anesthesia in order to subject their bodies to medical experimentation and allow the harvesting of their healthy organs. He delivered a paper on the subject to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Kevorkian shelved his quixotic campaign to engage death for social purposes and pursued a largely itinerant career as a medical pathologist. Though his friends described him as funny, witty, personable and engaging in private, those he met in work and social situations portrayed him as awkward, grim, driven, quick to anger and unpredictable.

Well? We're waiting! Did he off himself or not?

Who put him down?

He had more assists than Pippen in 1992.

I have a great deal of respect for this guy - it amazes me how we'll put down terminally ill animals as an act of mercy without a second thought, yet people must suffer needlessly due to religious horseshit and the enrichment of the medical industry. **** them all.

RIP Doc.

He stuck more needles in people than a Filipino tattoo artist.

I can see where this is going to end up...

http://www-deadline-com.vimg.net/wp-.../dc-comics.jpg

Agreed.

I understand the reasons for an elderly person in chronic pain, but what about the teenager that is just depressed because they are being bullied at school, or the new mom sufforing from post partum I'm just not sure where the line should be drawn and I don't have much faith in our government to know either.

I'd have to say that I wouldn't categorize your examples as "terminally ill."

Yeah, my fault I had forgotten the exact conditions that were being debated for physican assisted suicide. Althought I still think it would become a slippery slope to what would be classified as "terminally ill". I'm sure there have been many classified as "terminally ill" and then made full recoveries as well. I have a living uncle that was given less then a year to live (due to cancer) over 30 years ago.

Anyone that sees easy answers to this debate doesn't fully understand the question, IMO.

At gunpoint, I think I support Kevorikian's core beliefs (though his actions were still clearly illegal). But the slippery slope from 'terminally ill' to 'chronically uncomfortable', etc... could get fast in a hurry. And has been noted, 'terminally ill' is a funny thing. There are misdiagnosis all the time. Worse still, you know you'll have doctors that abuse this.

This just isn't a can of worms I'm excited about opening. Physician assisted suicide is, for all intents and purposes, a 'utilitarian' homicide. Once you open that box, suddenly its the utility element of it that becomes most widely debated as opposed to the fact that you're killing another human being.

It's a very very tough call, IMO.

This.

Kevorkian had balls the size of ****ing watermelons to do what he did.

I like what Tom Selleck said in Quigley Down Under. "You've got one shot left in that shooter. Make it a good one."

If someone is suffering and dying, let them go.

If someone is so racked by dementia or Alzheimers that keeping them alive benefits nothing but the nursing home's bottom line, let them go.

If someone is so batshit insane that they'll never be right, or fit to be around other people, let them go.

If someone is encarcerated for life or many years and would rather check out, let them go.

The notion of life being precious is a bunch of bullshit. Life is what the person living it makes of it, or what it turns into for that person. Sometimes it's better off ending.

I realize this view will offend some. To them, I say blow me. It's not like we're an endangered species.

RIP .. yea he helped so many cronic people that begged him for relief ....