In 1945, Jack began his career by enrolling at the University of Michigan. He graduated from medical school in 1952. The specialty he embraced was pathology, which is defined as the study of corpses and tissue to determine the cause of death or disease. This selection of specialty seemed to have fit Jack's tendency to be a loner and his belief in avoiding wastefulness.
Jack's medical career was interrupted for 15 months while he served in the Army during the Korean War. Upon discharge, he began residencies first at Pontiac General Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan, then at Detroit Receiving, where he earned the nickname, "Dr. Death." The name having been bestowed upon him due to his rushing between dying patients to take experimental photos of the changes that occurred in their eyes as they died.
Jack saw this as beneficial so that doctors could tell exactly when death had occurred and therefore when resuscitation should or should not be performed. He wrote a medical paper about his experiments and findings that was published in the American Journal of Pathology. Years later when he was not able to work as a physician, he continued to write articles for European medical journals with many chronicles that focused on euthanasia.
Jack finished his residencies at the University of Michigan Medical Center. He attended a seminar there in 1958. Information was presented at the seminar that caused Jack to begin research into the history of autopsies.
Jack discovered that ancient Greeks performed experiments on condemned criminals in Egypt to gain medical knowledge. Kevorkian even found out that in the 13th-Century, his ancestors, Armenians performed experiments on men condemned to death.
Jack began visiting prisons and writing papers to outline an idea to experiment on anesthetized prisoners before they were finally put to death with lethal injections. He listed the benefits to this experimentation as finding cures, testing new medications, saving money for research, and being able to study and understand the criminal. These ideas did not seem ghoulish to Jack since to do otherwise would be wasteful.
