Jesse Jones Mrs. Spicer English IV (H) May 7, 2004
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, M.D.
Should man have the right to choose the place, time, and manner of his own death? It is this question that brought Dr. Jack Kevorkian to fame and eventually prison in the late 1990s. But Dr. Kevorkian has led a very successful and interesting life, even though much of his greatest work was shunned because of his tendency to lean toward the macabre. He is an extremely intelligent and well-educated man who has authored and fought for many ideas only to be beaten in the end by ignorance.
Kevorkian was born to Armenian immigrants in Pontiac, Michigan in 1928. Micheal Betzold says in his book, Appointment with Dr.Death, that when Kevorkian was young, he was fascinated by baseball. His dream was to be trained by Cleveland Indians announcer Jack Graney, but he eventually decided to use his above-average intelligence for something more serious. He graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1952 and chose pathology as his specialization (3). Soon afterward, he began the first controversial work of his career. It was while working nights at Detroit Receiving Hospital, Betzold writes, that Kevorkian earned the nickname “Dr. Death” from his experiments in which he photographed the eyes of patients directly before, during, and after death. The research proved useful; it provided knowledge that could be used by doctors to distinguish between death and mere unconsciousness (1-2).
Another bizarre bit of research offered the medical profession a wealth of knowledge that, unfortunately, has not yet been put to good use. In 1958, according to Betzold, Kevorkian ran across some information concerning the Greek practice of conducting experiments on men who were condemned prisoners in Alexandria, Egypt. He also found that his Armenian ancestors had conducted the same kind of research in the 1200s. He decided the idea was of the utmost merit and importance to modern man and that it was his responsibility to share it with the world (4). Kevorkian worked hard to bring about attention and acceptance for the idea. Betzold says Kevorkian conducted interviews with condemned inmates at Ohio State Penitentiary about research on condemned men. He also wrote an essay explaining the idea in depth. The small amount of publicity created by Kevorkian’s campaign embarrassed his employer, the University of Michigan. He was asked to resign and was rejected by most journals and magazines in which he sought publication (4).
After leaving the U of M Medical Center and returning to Pontiac General Hospital, Kevorkian continued his outlandish work, this time, according to Betzold, conducting experiments with blood transfusions from dead people. Blood from heart attack and car accident victims was drained and saved to be put into live patients. There were no adverse medical effects caused by the practice, but Kevorkian’s reputation suffered due to his strange experimental work. He reported a loss of job opportunities because of it: “All they have to do is see my publications on cadaver blood and the condemned prisoner work. That alone settles the issue (5).”
Dr. Kevorkian’s personal life also offers some interesting tidbits . He even maintains his logical, scientific way of thinking when it comes to romance. Around 1970, Betzold says, Kevorkian was engaged; however, he broke off the engagement with the young store clerk, arguing that marriage was a waste of time as long as one could not find a partner who was perfectly compatible. He now calls his decision not to get married “the biggest mistake of my life.” He says that to refuse to reproduce is “from nature’s standpoint . . . immoral”; that it amounts to “shirking responsibility as a human being” ( 8 ). .Kevorkian also waxes artistic from time to time. In 1976, he incorporated a company called Penumbra, Inc. to fulfill his dream of making a movie about Handel’s Messiah. He completed a 90 minute film, but it was never sold or exhibited. He now refuses to talk about it, reports Betzold (9). A CD was released in late May of 1993 which featured Kevorkian playing jazz flute on his own compositions. It was titled “A Very Still Life: The Kevorkian Suite.” The cover art for the CD was one of Kevorkian’s own paintings, which have been widely exhibited, and have been referred to as “macabre,” “undeniably powerful,” and full of “rotting heads, corpses, that sort of thing (“The Art of Death”).”
It was in the 1980s that Kevorkian embarked on the campaign for the legalization of doctor-assisted suicide. Around this time, Betzold states, Kevorkian began proposing not only experimentation on death row inmates, but also on subjects who choose to be recipients of euthanasia. Again, he was ignored by all major publications to which he sent articles explaining this new proposal, excepting only an exclusively German published journal, Medicine and Law (11). For years, Holland has “looked the other way” concerning assisted suicide, neglecting to enforce or repeal its law against the practice. According to Nancy Gibbs, the Dutch Parliament even moved in February of 1992 toward giving doctors the right to assist in a patient’s suicide if he requests explicitly such assistance. She adds that the granting of this right brings a heavy responsibility with it and that the abuse of such authority could become an “instrument to meet social or economic goals, even ‘altruism’ (“Rx For Death” 95).”
Indeed, it was a 1987 visit to Amsterdam that prompted Dr. Kevorkian to create and begin practicing his method of assisted suicide in order to aid the terminally ill in ending their lives, suggests Micheal Betzold (13). Betzold also tells that in mid-1987, Kevorkian put ads in the classified sections of local papers, attempting to seek out participants for his new practice, which he had named “obitiatry” in order to “add a touch of dignity and legitimacy to the new specialty.” He received only two responses from prospective clients, neither of which ever received treatment from Kevorkian (13-14). But Kevorkian believed in the cause and was determined to do his part to further it.
Betzold says that in 1988 Kevorkian consulted the Oakland County Prosecutor’s office with an inquiry about the legality of obitiatry, an idea which he had now expanded to include experimentation on willing subjects in the interest of advanced medical knowledge. He was given no answer and was investigated by the state, which deemed him harmless (16-17). Judging by Kevorkian’s 1999 murder conviction, a mistake was made. Debbie Levy quotes Kevorkian as saying that “medical service is exempt from certain laws (91).” Kevorkian proceeded to assist more than 120 people in suicides throughout the 1990s. According to Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia 99, Kevorkian constructed the Thanatron (Greek for “death machine”) in 1989. Its purpose was to make possible the suicide through lethal injection of patients so incapacitated by their disease that they are unable to commit the deed in any other way. In 1990, Kevorkian attended for the first time a suicide using his Thanatron, which was designed to anesthetize the patient into unconsciousness before injecting the same chemical used for capital punishment. The patient in this case was Janet Adkins, a 54 year-old sufferer of Alzheimer’s disease (Encarta 99).
Kevorkian’s campaign for legal assisted suicide and euthanasia continued. Among the countless suicides he attended was that of Mr. Ronald Mansur. Nancy Gibbs reports that Kevorkian was present on May 16 of 1993 when Mr. Mansur, who suffered from cancer, ended his life. Kevorkian made an anonymous phone call to report the death to authorities (89). The police found Mr. Mansur dead in his office with his left middle finger tied to a device that has allowed carbon monoxide to run into the mask he was wearing. He was “too sick to drive,” and “carried a morphine pump. . . to combat the pain.” Donna Cady who had been a friend of Mr. Mansur’s for year, is quoted by Nancy Gibbs as saying “. . . he had his finger sticking up in the air to say screw you for all the laws that made me suffer like this.” Kevorkian was arrested for assisting Mansur’s suicide, but later acquitted when Judge Cynthia Stephens struck down the law “that threatened to curtail Kevorkian’s efforts” (90).
When one embarks on a crusade to change the world by disobeying a law, it is essential yet difficult to keep oneself morally immaculate in the eyes of the general public, and Kevorkian lost credibility by failing to do so. Gibbs makes a valid point by showing Kevorkian’s unfortunate self contradiction in the following case, that of the suicide of seventy year old emphysema patient Hugh Gale. Mr. Gale interrupted Kevorkian’s suicide assistance becoming, according to Kevorkian’s own records, “agitated” and saying “Take it off.” After calming down, he donned his carbon monoxide mask again, only to again become agitated. This time, he lost consciousness right after saying “Take it off.” The mask, however, was left on, and Mr. Gale’s heart stopped 3 minutes later. All this is according to Kevorkian’s report of the incident, which was said to be an “erroneous draft” by Kevorkian’s lawyer (95-96). Gibbs adds that Kevorkian once wrote that if, during the process of deciding to assist a patient in suicide, the patient expresses any doubt about his decision, “the entire process is to be stopped immediately (96).”
Suicide has always been one of the great taboos of society. Most religions believe that suicide is the one unforgivable sin, a guarantee of damnation. English common law held that suicide was a felony. The punishment was burial on the side of a public highway. On top of that, a stake was driven through the heart of the offender to keep his soul from wandering (Gibbs 94). But Jack Kevorkian has surely helped quite a few people out of obviously unbearable pain. Some believe he is a madman. In his essay entitled “A High Quad Defends Quality of Life - Kevorkian Argues I Would Be Better Off Dead Than Alive,” Mark O’Brian asserts that Kevorkian is a “serial killer” who has merely devised a clever way of staying out of prison. At any rate, Kevorkian’s euthanasia campaign is over. He was convicted in 1999 for delivery of a controlled substance and the second degree murder of Thomas Youk, when, in a highly controversial and bravely defiant gesture, Kevorkian submitted a tape to CBS’s 60 Minutes which included footage of Kevorkian’s euthanasia of the near immobile sufferer of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He is still serving his sentence and will be eligible for parole in 2007. Whether he is right or wrong, he is a great man who has paid the ultimate price of his freedom in a fight for his beliefs.
