Dr. Death lives on at the Bentley Historical Library.
Jack Kevorkian was an Oakland County physician who became a household name across the country in the 1990s for his illegal role in helping upward of 100 terminally ill people end their lives. Michigan prosecutors put him on trial five times for physician-assisted suicide, winning a conviction with the final trial in 1999.
Kevorkian’s papers, including recorded conversations with desperate patients, were donated to the university after his own (unassisted) death.
Nicknamed “Dr. Death” early in his medical career because of his strong support of euthanasia, Kevorkian was a 1952 graduate of the U-M Medical School. At a 1958 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Kevorkian proposed that inmates on death row have the option of dying under anesthesia in medical experiments rather than face the electric chair or gas chamber. (His views led officials to eject Kevorkian, a pathologist, from his U-M residency.)
Donated by Kevorkian’s niece Ava Janus, the papers were made public in 2015. The collection includes letters, family photographs, court files, drawings and paintings, and video and audio recordings. Kevorkian called his work “medicide,” and his papers include records of 30 physician-assisted deaths.
“Long before Jack Kevorkian was known as ‘Dr. Death,’ he was a child of Armenian immigrants, a successful student, a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School, a musician, composer and scientist,” said historian Terrence McDonald, director of the Bentley Historical Library at the time. “The release of his papers will allow scholars and students to understand the context of and driving forces in an interesting and provocative life.”
In the late 1980s, Kevorkian built a so-called death machine that administered lethal doses of drugs at the request of people who were either dying or living with debilitating injuries and pain. Records at the Bentley include recorded and digitized consultations with patients asking Kevorkian to help end their lives. In one conversation, a woman who had lost both legs and an eye to chronic disease says, “I’m really full of despair because the pain can’t be controlled. I’d really like an out.”
After being convicted of second-degree murder, Kevorkian served eight years in a state prison. He was released in 2007 and died in 2011 at age 83.
