You’ve seen him on the news and Nightline, and you’ve read about him in everything from TV Guide to Time. Dr. Jack Kevorkian in one month went from being a relatively unknown pathologist to the now infamous “Dr. Death.” With euthanasia fast becoming the moral/medical issue of the decade, is Dr. Kevorkian a mere maverick in his field, or a prophet of things to come?

Kevorkian was thrown into the nation’s headlines on June 4, 1990. In a Detroit public park, Kevorkian made fifty-four-year-old Janet Adkins, suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, his first “suicide machine client.” In the process, Adkins became “America’s first acknowledged case of medically assisted suicide.”

Most reports concerning Kevorkian focus on his death machine. Cornerstone contacted the doctor [in 1990], asking him not only about what happened June 4, but his philosophy in general.

“It was her decision to die,” Kevorkian said. “She and her husband made reservations to fly out from Portland, and I searched around frantically for a place to do it. I checked churches, hospitals, offices for rent, apartments for rent, anything. Nothing was available. They were all afraid of the stigma of having this done in their place.”

In the end, Kevorkian had to settle for the use of his 1968 Volkswagen van. On the weekend of June 2, he drove to Groveland Oaks Park and hooked his van up to an electrical outlet which would provide the power for his machine. Meanwhile, the Adkinses arrived from Portland and arranged to meet Kevorkian to finalize their plans.

“I spent all day with them Saturday. I kept probing Mrs. Adkins’ mental state. She was very intelligent, but it was obvious that her memory was failing. She even had trouble spelling names. But she knew what she was doing. I checked into the fact that she knew who she was, where she was, and what the consequences of her actions would be. I made her say in her own words, ‘End my life,’ ‘I will die,’ ‘Yes, it’s death.’ ”

Kevorkian and the Adkinses chose to go ahead with their decision. On Monday Kevorkian’s sister, Flora, picked up Mrs. Adkins and drove her to the van where the doctor was waiting.

“Mrs. Adkins did not want her husband to be with her. She knew it would be too wrenching of an experience for him. When she arrived I was setting my machine up. It is a rather simple device. There are three bottles. The first one contains a normal saline solution. I started the intravenous drip of saline into Mrs. Adkins’ arm. The two other bottles have tubes that plug into that same needle. The one bottle contains Pentothal (which induces a coma in twenty-five to thirty seconds) and the other bottle contains potassium chloride with a muscle relaxant (which stops the heart and causes death within minutes).

“When Mrs. Adkins was ready I turned on the cardiogram I had attached to her limbs. This was to monitor the heartbeat as a medical control of the moment of death. I then instructed her on how to hit the switch which would stop the flow from the saline solution and start the flow from the other two bottles. My sister then read her the Lord’s Prayer and a brief note written by Adkins’ husband. I told her everything was ready, and Mrs. Adkins hit the switch three times to make sure it was done correctly. She said, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ And as her eyes were closing, I said, ‘Have a good trip.’

“I think anybody can guess at what my feelings were at that moment. I was relieved that it worked well; that the patient got the wish she wanted. And it also occurred to me that ‘My God, we’re in the middle of the first step.’ ”

To many, Kevorkian’s machine and manners qualify him as the Rube Goldberg of Death. But his actions of June 4 were the result of deeply held opinions on the right-to-die issue.

“I believe there are people who are healthy and mentally competent enough to decide on suicide. People who are not depressed. Everyone has a right for suicide, because a person has a right to determine what will or will not be done to his body. There’s no place for people to turn today who really want to commit suicide. Teenagers, and the elderly especially, have nowhere to turn. But when they come to me, they will obey what I say because they know they’re talking to an honest doctor. I can talk a teenager out of suicide easily if he comes to me, because he knows if it’s justified I’ll help him do it.”

What started off as Dr. Kevorkian’s “first step” with his machine may also have been his personal last. On June 8, Oakland County Circuit Judge Alice Gilbert issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting Kevorkian from committing “any acts to help a patient commit suicide” until prosecutors decide whether his suicide device is legal. A wide-ranging investigation that could result in criminal charges against Kevorkian has not yet been completed.

“What’s the court got to do with medicine!” Kevorkian exclaimed.

“They are dictating how medicine should be practiced. You know the court is dominated by religion . . . ‘Life is sanctity, this and that . . .’ so what! Instead of intimidating me, I’m intimidating them! There’s no law broken—they know it! They’re looking for a way to get me. They’re out to burn me at the stake figuratively. The problem with medicine today is that it’s under the Dark Age mentality of mystical religion, which has permeated medicine to the core since Christianity took over.”

In every major city, Kevorkian would like to see clinics that he calls “obitoriums” set up to serve those wanting to commit suicide. “Now you would have to draw up a strict code of ethics to regulate these clinics. Both society and doctors, but doctors mainly, would work to establish the code of ethics. The origin of the ethics, however, must come from the situation as it exists. And the code must fit the situation. And the ethics must change as the situation changes. That’s the way to keep control. Not by an inflexible maxim that applies for two thousand years, but an ethical code that will change a decade later.

“It’s ethical conduct within the framework of time and space. Ethical codes should never be set in stone. They can’t be, they must change constantly. That’s why we have problems today, because most of the ethics are dictated by inflexible religious doctrine: ‘Human life is divine, it cannot be ended.’ Who said it? I don’t feel holy. You can’t make one doctrine fit everybody. It’s between patient and doctor. That’s all it is. Nothing else counts. The code of ethics should be based only on medical knowledge. No theology, no philosophic doctrines that are abstract. Only what is really valid medically!”

Cornerstone countered with, “What is to guarantee that the doctors will make the correct ethical choices in running the death clinics?” Kevorkian responded angrily, “I can keep this controlled while I’m alive, but after I die you’ll get corruptible doctors running them. But that doesn’t scare me, that should scare society. That’s society’s problem.”

Dr. Kevorkian’s views on euthanasia do not stop at “planned death,” but build to an ultimate conclusion. This is probably best expressed in the articles he has written over the years for the professional journal, Medicine and Law. In 1986 he wrote on human experimentation:

The so-called Nuremberg Code and all its derivatives completely ignore the extraordinary opportunities for terminal experimentation on humans facing imminent and inevitable death. . . . Intense emotionalism engendered by the concentration camp atrocities of World War II has unfairly stigmatized this honorable concept and cloaked it in silence. . . .

. . . Now that the benumbed sense of objective appraisal manifested by the Nuremberg judges has begun to wear off, at last it is conceded that they were wrong in concluding that nothing of value resulted from the illegal experiments. . . . The data are all the more valuable because similar human experiments can never again be done. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that a few of the medical criminals did the right thing (extraction of positive gain from inevitably total loss otherwise beyond their influence) but in the wrong way (without concern over consent or anesthesia) and in the wrong setting (created by the evil “laws” of a diabolical dictator.)[1]

At the end of his article, Kevorkian offers a bioethical “Code of Conduct” for “any professional or lay individual in any way participating in experimentation on human beings facing undeniably imminent and inevitable death.”

C.(1). Experiments may be of any kind or complexity. . . . C.(2). While a prospective subject is fully conscious, an experimenter may start any procedure which on thorough analysis portends no significant distress for the subject. . . . C.(3). Induction and irreversible maintenance of at least stage III general anesthesia is imperative before experimentation is begun on the following prospective subjects: (a) All brain-dead, comatose, mentally incompetent, or otherwise completely uncommunicative individuals. (b) All neonates, infants, and children less than (-) years old (age must be arbitrarily set by consensus). (c) All living intrauterine and aborted or delivered fetuses. C.(4). If the subject’s body is alive at the end of experimentation, final biologic death may be induced by means of: (a) Removal of organs for transplantation. (b) A lethal dose of a new or untested drug. . . . (c) A lethal intravenous bolus of thiopental solution. . . .[2]

Kevorkian’s research into human experimentation began while he was in the residency program at the University of Michigan, and eventually led to his removal from the program.

“While I was in my residency I was researching the idea of condemned men being allowed to submit to anesthesia rather than execution. While under anesthesia we could do experiments from which they wouldn’t recover, and then remove their organs. Now if you needed a liver or a heart, would you like to see a young healthy man or woman fried in the electric chair? No! But that Dark Age school told me I would have to drop the project I was working on or leave. So I left, and spent my last two years of residency at Pontiac.” While an associate pathologist at Pontiac General Hospital Kevorkian ran into more trouble. As part of an experiment he transfused cadaver blood directly into several patients. Kevorkian’s actions shocked the U.S. medical community, but no legal action was taken against him.

“All it involved was taking blood out of dead people who died suddenly and then transfusing it into living people just like regular blood. The Russians had been doing it for over half a century, but instead of transfusing it directly into a person, they would store it in a blood bank. We did that first, then we went further by using a syringe pump to take the blood directly from the heart of a dead person and put it into a living person. I thought it would be great on the battlefield, but they called it macabre research.”

In a 1988 Medicine and Law article Kevorkian builds on his previous ideas of human experimentation by combining it with his theories on planned death. In his article, “The Last Fearsome Taboo: Medical Aspects of Planned Death,” Kevorkian explains how with the experimentation you move from “euthanasia” or “good death” to an area called “eutatosthanasia” or “best death.”

Planned death is the purposeful ending of human life by direct human action. The concept is broader than euthanasia or “mercy killing,” which are the ways it is usually interpreted. It includes capital punishment, both involuntary and voluntary; obligatory suicide mandated by rigid theistic or philosophical principles; quasi-optional suicide for the relief of suffering resulting from illness, disability, or old age; strictly optional suicide for reasons not known to others; justifiable infanticide or pedicide; and feticide, both intra- and extrauterine.[3]

Kevorkian even explains how animal rights advocates should totally back his ideas since experimentation now done on animals could be done on humans. “The proposed innovation should be extolled by animal rights advocates, because it would eliminate the need for animals now sacrificed unnecessarily in many aspects of academic and industrial research.”

In the 1989 issue of Medicine and Law, Kevorkian focuses on the need for a “commercial market for human organs and tissues.” His article on planned death is reminiscent of the movie Soylent Green, and one can’t help but be reminded of the book Coma while reading his views on harvesting and selling body parts.

It seems more compassionate and logical to have a certain number of wealthy persons dying of renal disease buy kidneys from a supply greatly expanded by their purchasing power and thus survive while a certain number of dying poor individuals succumb because of the inequity of affordability. . . . Surprisingly, sales to the rich could indirectly save more lives of the poor: because quality often erroneously is equated with price, wealthy donees might prefer to buy very expensive, “high-quality” kidneys from donors in the upper strata of society and leave most or all of the freely donated or very low-priced, “low-quality” organs from “skid row” donors to the poor—thereby actually enhancing equity.[5]

So what should we make of Dr. Kevorkian and his varying views on euthanasia? The two main forces behind the euthanasia movement, the Hemlock Society and the Society for the Right to Die, both remained unusually quiet during Kevorkian’s time with the press. Was it out of disapproval, or because he was saying too much, too soon?

Whatever, it cannot be denied that our country is moving much closer to legalized euthanasia. According to a Gannett News Service —USA Today poll, two-thirds of all Americans say they believe the terminally ill should be allowed to end their lives and that medical facilities should be available to help them do it.

Perhaps the threat of all this can be best summed up in a quote from Patrick J. Buchanan, “Once all the other frontiers have been crossed, the final one is the great leap forward by the state, when it declares that, just as a mother has the right to terminate the life of her unborn, just as a family has the right to pull the plug on grandparents, so the state has a right to rid itself of those who threaten the social organism. In our lifetime, Germany, Russia, China, and Cambodia have crossed this final frontier of twentieth century man.”

But as Christians do we really need to worry? Aren’t Kevorkian’s ideas just the farfetched dreams of a “modern Dr. Frankenstein”? Dr. Kevorkian doesn’t seem to think so . . .

“What I’m talking about is inevitable. The people who are opposing this are gonna lose eventually, just like they lost in birth control and everything else that happened in medicine. It’s an obstinate, futile opposition. The future, well, it comes eventually.”

1. Jack Kevorkian, “A Comprehensive Bioethical Code for Medical Exploitation of Humans Facing Imminent and Unavoidable Death,” Medicine and Law 5 (1986): 181, 183. [return]

2. Ibid., 194-95. [return]

3. Jack Kevorkian, “The Last Fearsome Taboo: Medical Aspects of Planned Death,” Medicine and Law 7 (1988): 3. [return]

4. Ibid., 9. [return]

5. Jack Kevorkian, “Marketing of Human Organs and Tissues Is Justified and Necessary,” Medicine and Law 7 (1989): 562. [return]

First published in Cornerstone (ISSN 0275-2743), Vol. 26, Issue 113 (1997), p. 18-12 (Originally published in Cornerstone in 1990)
© 1997 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.
Electronic version may contain minor changes and corrections from printed version.