Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist who put assisted suicide on the world's medical ethics stage, died early Friday, according to a spokesman with Beaumont Hospital. He was 83. The assisted-suicide advocate had been hospitalized in Michigan for pneumonia and a kidney-related ailment, his attorney Mayer Morganroth has said. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Kevorkian's favorite musician, was put on the intercom so he could hear the music as he was dying, Morganroth said. The 83-year-old former pathologist had struggled with kidney problems for years and had checked into a hospital earlier this month for similar problems, his lawyer, Mayer Morganroth, told CNN last month. He checked back into Beaumont Hospital in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak on May 18 after suffering a relapse, Morganroth said. Kevorkian, dubbed "Dr. Death," made national headlines as a supporter of physician-assisted suicide and "right-to-die" legislation. He was charged with murder numerous times through the 1990s for helping terminally ill patients take their own lives. He was convicted on second-degree murder charges in 1999 stemming from the death of a patient who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease. He was paroled in 2007. After his release, he said he would not help end any more lives. In an interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta last year, Kevorkian said he had no regrets about his work. "No, no. It's your purpose (as a) physician. How can you regret helping a suffering patient?" he said. In that interview, Kevorkian said that he had three missions in life and that he himself was not ready to die. One of his missions was to warn mankind of "impending doom" that will come from the culture of overabundance. "I'm not going to be too popular for that one," he said. His second mission was to educate people about assisted suicide, and his belief that in states where assisted suicide has been legalized, it is not being done right. He believed that people shouldn't have to be terminal in order to qualify for help in ending their own lives. Kevorkian's third stated mission was to convince Americans that their rights are being infringed upon by bans on everything from smoking to assisted suicide. In 2008, at the age of 79, he had a failed run for Congress in Michigan. Morganroth told the Detroit Free Press it appears Kevorkian suffered a pulmonary thrombosis when a blood clot from his leg broke free and lodged in his heart. With Kevorkian were his niece Ava Janus and Morganroth. “It was peaceful," Morganroth told the paper. "He didn’t feel a thing." http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/03/report-dr-jack-kevorkian-dead/?hpt=hp_t2 --------------------------------------- This may end up in the D and D, but I don't think it should. Admittedly, I don't know everything about Kevorkian's case, but I have no problem with what he did. If people are sick and suffering, then I don't have a problem with them being euthanised. We do it to our animals, for Pete's sake. The one thing that disturbs me is that there are reports that some of the people he "helped along" were not terminal. At least he cared about people, and in my opinion, had their well-being at his utmost interest. For that, RIP.
Probably wouldn't have been so controversial if he didn't have a creepy name that sounded like "the lure of the animal".
I've taken a few biomedical ethics classes and it always seemed to me that the biggest issue with assisted suicide was the slippery slope argument (similar to abortion). That once you start "assisting" terminal patients where do you draw the line. I think he did a good thing by bringing the issue to the national forefront because it's definitely going to become a bigger issue as the general population ages.
