The British Broadcasting Corporation(BBC), in its Nov. 26, 1998 "Profile: 'Dr. Death,'" wrote:
"Dr Jack Kevorkian, a 70-year-old retired pathologist, has devoted most of his life to the campaign for assisted suicide…
He embarked on a career in pathology, gaining the nickname 'Dr Death' in the 1950s through his efforts to photograph the eyes of dying patients.
Dr Kevorkian became the chief pathologist of Saratoga General Hospital in Detroit in 1970, but he quit his career a few years later, traveled to California, and invested his life savings in directing and producing a feature movie based on Handel's Messiah.
With no distributor, the movie flopped.
He started writing about euthanasia in the 1980s, first in an obscure German journal Medicine and Law, outlining for example his proposed system of planned deaths in suicide clinics, including medical experimentation on patients.
Dr Kevorkian has admitted helping more than 130 people to end their lives.
The first suicide he was involved in was the 1990 death of Jane Adkins, 54, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. She died in Dr Kevorkian's Volkswagen van in Groveland Oaks Park near Holly, Michigan.
Her death was assisted by a 'suicide machine' - built by Dr Kevorkian using $30 worth of scrap parts from garage sales and hardware stores at his kitchen table...
In 1995, he even opened a 'suicide clinic' in an office in Springfield Township, Michigan, but was booted out by the building's owner a few days after his first client died."
Ian Dowbiggin, PhD, Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island, in his 2003 book A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, explained:
"On Sunday night, November 22, 1998, viewers of the CBS television program 60 Minutes watched in horror as Dr. Jack Kevorkian killed fifty-two-year-old Thomas Youk. Youk, suffering from...Lou Gehrig's disease, had asked Kevorkian to end his life, and Kevorkian complied by injecting him with poison to stop his heart.
Youk was not the first person Kevorkian had helped to die, but he was likely the last. In 1999, the seventy-year-old Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to jail for ten to twenty-five years.
What Kevorkian had done was deliberately...hasten another person's death, an act of active 'euthanasia'... Acquitted of the charge of assisting suicide by three juries in the 1990s, Kevorkian crossed the line in 1998 by not only administering the lethal injection but also videotaping Youk's death and defying prosecutors to charge him. Kevorkian's goal in life is to overturn America's laws prohibiting both active euthanasia and assisted suicide..."
Herbert Hendin, MD, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at New York Medical College, stated in his 1999 article "Kevorkian on Trial: The Death of Thomas Youk" published in the Psychiatric Times:
"Kevorkian
has told us that he sees as euthanasia candidates not only those
suffering from disease, deformity or trauma, but people with 'intense
anxiety or psychic torture inflicted by self or others'...
Kevorkian's
fascination with death, also expressed in his paintings of dismembered
bodies, has a long history. He was first called 'Dr. Death' in 1956
during his medical residency because of his interest in photographing
the retinal blood vessels of patients at the moment of their deaths. He
achieved notoriety a few years later with papers suggesting that death
row inmates be anesthetized at execution time so that their living
bodies could be used for experiments lasting hours, or even months,
after which they would be given a lethal dose of anesthetic. Thus, this
would save the lives of innocent animals killed in the name of science.
His
persistent advocacy of such experimentation made him a pariah among
physicians, and caused him to lose an academic appointment at the
University of Michigan."
