Dr Jack Kevorkian Dies

up for anything · 03-06-2011 6:49pm #1

Unassisted.

New York Times

Dr. Jack Kevorkian Dies at 83; Backed Assisted Suicide
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
Published: June 3, 2011

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the medical pathologist who helped dozens of terminally ill people kill themselves, becoming the central figure in a national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died on Friday in a Detroit-area hospital. He was 83.

The cause 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, at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., was confirmed by Geoffrey Feiger, the lawyer who represented Dr. Kevorkian during several of his trials in the 1990s.

Dr. Kevorkian challenged social taboos about disease and dying, willfully defying prosecutors and the courts as he actively sought national celebrity. He 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.

His story became the subject of the 2010 HBO movie "You Don’t Know Jack." Al Pacino, who played Dr. Kevorkian in the movie, earned Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his performance. In his Emmy acceptance speech, Mr. Pacino said he had been gratified to “try to portray someone as brilliant and interesting and unique" as Dr. Kevorkian and that it had been a "pleasure to know him." Dr. Kevorkian, who was in the audience, smiled in appreciation.

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.

My name is URL · 03-06-2011 6:55pm

RIP

too young..

Saila · 03-06-2011 6:58pm

RIP so much life left why are they taken so early

Turtyturd · 03-06-2011 7:02pm

Stick a Kevork in him...he's done.

Superbus · 03-06-2011 7:03pm

Keep calm and carry on. It's all you can do at a time so dark.

ejmaztec · 03-06-2011 7:04pm

Good job he didn't die in China, or his organs would have been sold off for Ipad 2s by now.

03-06-2011 7:31pm

ejmaztec wrote: »

Good job he didn't die in China, or his organs would have been sold off for Ipad 2s by now.

The day's most random post.

Temptamperu · 03-06-2011 7:56pm

Its a damn shame he passed, he helped a lot of people even though most of the world saw him as some sort of ghoul.

RIP

bonerm · 03-06-2011 7:59pm

Amazing sportsman. Didn't score many goals but had plenty of assists.

RIP

Terry · 03-06-2011 8:13pm

I killed him.

ejmaztec wrote: »

Good job he didn't die in China, or his organs would have been sold off for Ipad 2s by now.

Deleted User wrote: »

The day's most random post.

I got it.

dvpower · 03-06-2011 8:21pm

Deleted User wrote: »

The day's most random post.

Some kid in China sold a kidney to buy an iPad2

ejmaztec · 03-06-2011 8:29pm

Terry wrote: »

I killed him.

I got it.

dvpower wrote: »

Some kid in China sold a kidney to buy an iPad2

I'm glad to see that some people are on the ball:pac:

You must both go to the same shrink as me.

mud · 03-06-2011 10:36pm

Anyone ever read the book by Kurt Vonnegut called: "God bless you Dr. Kevorkian"?

I thought it was a good book and it was my introduction to the late Dr.

RIP.