UFO Info Week-End

He worked as a pathologist at Pontiac General Hospital for six years after

He worked as a pathologist at Pontiac General Hospital for six years, after which his employment record grew ever spottier, and included the setting up of an early computerised diagnostic centre which soon went bankrupt. Among other things, he subsequently invented a new kind of baseball cap which he tried to market, and in 1989 he was turned down for a position not as a doctor, but as a paramedic. He now has no licence to practise medicine anywhere in the United States.Dr Kevorkian is not motivated by money. He is not interested in good food or other luxuries, does not care where he lives and once proudly boasted on television that his suit cost only $15 He has never married It was in the late 1980s that he moved into euthanasia. In 1987 he had a business card printed: “Jack Kevorkian, MD.. Bioethics and Obitriaty.. Special Death Counseling.

By Appointment only.”He did not help anyone to die until 1990 when a 54-year-old Oregon woman killed herself using his newly invented automatic syringe, the Thanatron (later refined into the Mercitron), in the back of his battered Volkswagen van parked in a campsite near Detroit Dr Kevorkian’s accession to world fame was secure. His favoured method for assisted suicide, however, is the inhalation of carbon monoxide. He thinks it gives the deceased a nice healthy pink tinge, which comforts relatives. If he had a coat of arms, its motto would no doubt be a quotation from Mrs Gamp: He’d make a lovely corpse.

Since that first assisted suicide, he has hardly looked back. He has attended about 40 deaths, has twice been charged with murder and also several times with assisting suicide. So far – thanks to an alliance with Geoffrey Fieger, a clever lawyer who believes in Kevorkian’s crusade – he has not been found guilty of any crime.Controversy has attached not only to the very concepts of physician- assisted suicide and euthanasia, but to the particular cases chosen by Kevorkian. A high proportion of his “patients” have been women, giving rise to the charge of misogyny; and some appear not to have been suffering from any fatal condition at the time of their demise.For example, his 35th case, Judith Curren, was found at post mortem to be suffering from nothing other than obesity, though she had also suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome before her death. Only five feet one inch tall, she weighed 19 stones, and was said to be confined to a wheelchair, though whether that confinement was for physical or psychological reasons is a matter of dispute.Moreover, she was unhappily married to her former psychiatrist, who is strongly suspected of having been repeatedly violent towards her.

Not only had she obtained a restraining order against him, but the police had been called to their house 10 times. Shortly before her death, her husband was arrested for assaulting her, though he was later released.When he helped her to kill herself, Kevorkian knew nothing of her unhappy domestic circumstances. Asked on television whether this ignorance implied that he did not know the people he killed very well, Kevorkian replied: “Who said the relationship should be intimate? I’m a medical doctor, I can review records, and I can see patients, and I can examine them. Who says I’ve got to learn what their family history is and who their children are and what they did 50 years ago?”So much for careful evaluation of candidates for assisted suicide.