Word: kevorkian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Over the years Kevorkian has been generous to his adversaries in the church, - the press, the medical profession, even the euthanasia movement. Every time he speaks or writes he hands them ammunition to dismiss him as a psychopath. "If I were Satan and I was helping a suffering person end his life, would that make a difference?" he asks. "Any person who does this is going to have an image problem." That larger-than-death image grew with each story of his early experiments transfusing blood from cadavers to live patients, his paintings of comas and fevers, his bright-eyed...
...Mansur case, like those that preceded it, captures the worst fears of opponents of doctor-assisted suicide. By operating outside the law, they say, doctors like Kevorkian go unregulated, unsupervised, abiding only by those safeguards they impose on themselves. They alone make judgments about the patient's state of mind; about what means, short of death, might relieve the suffering. They transform the image of the doctor from pure, emphatic healer to something more ambiguous, even sinister, whose purpose at the patient's bedside is no longer clear...
...eyes even of some who disagree with his methods, Kevorkian has become the devil that doctors deserve. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Biomedical Ethics, puts it succinctly. "I'll give him this," he says. "He tells us exactly where the health- care system stinks." Even some doctors reluctantly agree. "A significant percent of the American public sees Kevorkian as a reasonable alternative to modern medicine," says professor George Annas of Boston University's School of Medicine. "He's a total indictment of the way we treat dying patients in hospitals and at home...
...thought about it for more than two minutes to say something like that. The vast majority simply don't know how to treat pain, and they don't think it's important. They want to cure the person. Death is still seen as the enemy. And that's what Kevorkian throws in their face. What he says is, 'Some people want death, and I am going to give it to them...
Faced with such prospects, is it any wonder Kevorkian has hundreds of letters from people who want him to help them...