Too bad the magazine’s editors didn’t include a section on ‘Graduates who should be remembered in infamy,’ because that is what Kevorkian richly deserved.
Medicine at Michigan is a medical news magazine that reports on activities of the University of Michigan Medical School. The magazine recently published a list of 175 “stories” of its “leaders and best” doctors that were affiliated with or graduated from the medical school.
The doctors so honored offered tremendous service to the profession, such as the great pediatric neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson, and the developer of the first polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk. But one of the listees — the late Jack Kevorkian — was a true villain and has no place being honored in any regard.
Kevorkian is listed under the section labeled, “Making a difference internationally” and “helping to serve the world.” This is how it begins:
“Dear Dr. Kevorkian, HELP! I am a 41-year-old victim of MS. I can no longer take care of myself. Being of sound mind, I wish to end my life peacefully . . .”
This letter from 1990 is typical of the correspondence received by Jack Kevorkian, who was the best-known advocate for physician-assisted suicide in the United States.
Yes he was. But let’s get real.
Kevorkian had an unremarkable medical career as a pathologist. He wouldn’t be remembered at all but for killing or assisting the suicides (mostly, with carbon monoxide) of some 130 people during the 1990s.
But we do need to remember Kevorkian. Not as a leader, not as a server of humanity, not as someone who made a positive “difference,” but because of his ghoulish obsessions with death, his vile purposes for assisting suicides, and the unfortunate reality that the world he dreamed of establishing is indeed coming into being.
Kevorkian wrote about his true goals in a book called Prescription Medicide: The Goodness of a Planned Death:
I feel it is only decent and fair to explain my ultimate aim. . . . It is not simply to help suffering or doomed persons kill themselves — that is merely the first step, an early distasteful professional obligation (now called medicide) that nobody in his or her right mind would savor. . . . What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish.
Kevorkian’s overriding purpose was pure quackery. He wanted to obtain a societal license to engage in what he called “obitiatry,” that is, the right to experiment on the brains and spinal cords of “living human bodies” to “pinpoint the exact onset of extinction of an unknown cognitive mechanism that energizes life.”
Kevorkian was bigoted against people with disabilities. He stated that paraplegics and quadriplegics are “pathological” if they do not want to die, writing in a court statement that such deaths “can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare.” Indeed, most of his assisted suicide kills were people with disabilities, rather than the terminally ill. No doubt, that is why the first action by the anti-assisted-suicide/disability-rights group, Not Dead Yet, was a protest at Kevorkian’s home.
Kevorkian also wanted people dying by euthanasia to have their organs harvested. He even ripped out the kidneys of one of his victims (the coroner’s report called it a “bizarre mutilation:”), an ex-cop with quadriplegia named Joseph Tushkowski, and offered them in a news conference, “First come, first served.” In this, he was a dark prophet. Euthanasia and organ harvesting are now conjoined in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Kevorkian also advocated for death on demand. He believed that if someone wanted to die, they should have help doing it, essentially no questions asked. Again, he was a prophet. The highest courts in Germany and Estonia have ruled that people have a fundamental human right to kill themselves and have anyone they want help do it.
Kevorkian served time in prison for the murder of ALS patient Thomas Youk, whom he euthanized, on camera. He immediately took the snuff video to Mike Wallace who eagerly played it on 60 Minutes.
Alas, proving these days that no cultural bad deed goes unrewarded, Kevorkian received $50,000 for speaking after his release from prison and was the subject of an HBO hagiographic biopic, You Don’t Know Jack, starring Al Pacino.
To a certain degree, that title is apt. Thanks to media bias, he is remembered as he was depicted at the time, a caring pioneer who only wanted to relieve suffering — which was also the primary take of the Medicine at Michigan entry.
Bah. Too bad the editors didn’t include a section on “Graduates who should be remembered in infamy,” because that is what Kevorkian richly deserved.