What Do You Know About Jack Kevorkian aka Dr. Death? (Part 2)

Jack's concept of creating a new branch of science would bring into being a need for doctors to perform these experiments in this new medical specialty. Jack wrote articles and presented his ideas at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. in December of 1958. Afterwards, he was asked to stop pursuing the notion of experimenting on condemned prisoners by his boss at the University of Michigan. Jack promptly quit his job and returned to the employ of Pontiac General.

At Pontiac General, Jack became interested in yet another controversial subject. One of his co-workers told him that Russian doctors were experimenting with transfusing blood from corpses. Not to be out done, Jack started procuring corpses from heart attacks and auto accidents. After performing an autopsy, Jack would drain the blood from the deceased and transfuse the blood into living persons. The method worked.

In 1964, Jack published an article in Military Medicine, about his research in transfusing blood from dead persons to live ones. He hoped his idea could be used on the battlefield in Vietnam. The article was accompanied by a posed photo of a transfusion being performed by a corpsman during a battle.

When Jack tried to sell the Pentagon on the theory, the Defense Department rejected his idea and he was denied a research grant for his program. Jack resolved never again to waste time trying to obtain support from the government. What did Dr. Death do for fun? His interests gravitated toward the peculiar and toward activities that one could do alone. He taught himself to read and play music. He took painting lessons and produced art works that were ghoulish renditions that contained blood, skulls and gore.

Jack wrote a diet book called Slimmeriks and the Demi-Diet. He went to Hollywood and invested his life savings in directing and producing a movie about Handel's Messiah. The film had no distributorship and was not exhibited.

At this point you may be wondering how Dr. Kevorkian became convinced in the ethicalness of doctor-assisted suicide. He explains that he arrived at this conclusion after observing a severely emaciated middle age woman dying of cancer. He observed this woman while he was an intern and later wrote about the experience in his book, Prescription: Medicine, published in 1991.

Jack became aware in 1986, that doctors in the Netherlands were practicing euthanasia. He had been working again

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