EXACTLY THE SORT OF ICON YOU'D EXPECT THEM TO HOLD UP:

It was an exercise in moral Botox: a review of You Don't Know Jack (Mary Eberstadt, In Character)

Thanks in part to the work of bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, we do indeed know plenty already about the doctor who might better be called Peeping Jack - more, in fact, than some readers will be able to stomach, even in a brief telling. As a medical student, he stalked corridors and entered rooms to watch people die. He next stalked prisons performing executions, repeatedly seeking the bodies of the condemned for experimentation -- a craving that led ultimately to his being ousted from residency in 1958.

He pioneered, if that is the word, experiments in transfusing blood from corpses into live people (and gave at least one human research subject hepatitis by doing so). He wanted to pioneer other tests too, but the medical establishment -- not exactly a squeamish bunch -- found his research interests somewhat alarming. He invented a killing machine he called the "Thanatron" and used it on his subjects -- most of them terminally sick, a few not -- until his license was revoked and he ran out of access to liquid poisons. At that point he started having people gas themselves instead via his "Mercitron." Smith believes that Kevorkian's eventual turn to assisting some 130 suicides was a default calling of sorts - something he turned to only when he was unable to gain access to what he really wanted. Those were the corpses of condemned prisoners - or perhaps we should make that "pre-corpses"; young Dr. Kevorkian proposed keeping them somewhat alive, near death, for purposes of medical experimentation.

What makes the HBO movie even more surreal is that Wesley Smith is hardly the only observer to have called out the ghoulish truth about Dr. Death over the years. Kevorkian's own record of public statements is such that Nancy Gibbs of Time once observed in a cover story that "Every time he speaks or writes he hands them [his critics] ammunition to dismiss him as a psychopath." Then there are the doctor's many grandstanding interviews and stunts in practically every corner of America where a camera could be found. If we don't know Jack after everything he's told us - and told us, and told us - then whom do we know?

Apparently no one, if the portrayal by HBO and the preternaturally gifted Pacino is to be believed. Their Jack is a crotchety, well-meaning, card-playing, persecuted (by the religious right, of course) sometime flautist and all-around aesthete ("Bach is my god"). In better news and to its credit, the movie does emphasize that Kevorkian is, of course, an atheist. I say "of course" because only a self-declared atheist could likely have gotten away with what Kevorkian did for as long as he did; no believer could have possibly have wrapped himself in the flag of supposed religious persecution as he and his lawyer managed for many years.

All of which may provide a key to understanding the enthusiasm for this project. Atheism in Hollywood today - like defending Roman Polanski a few months ago, or having movie stars wear reading glasses a few years before that - is a hot commodity.

A View to a Kill: Is Jack Kevorkian headed to a theater near you? (Wesley J. Smith, 12/14/05, National Review)

In reality, Kevorkian's notorious assisted-suicide campaign, which dominated the headlines throughout most of the 1990s, was driven by a ghoulish desire to conduct human vivisection, or "obitiatry," as he liked to call it. Yes, you read right. Kevorkian's primary motive in all that he did was to create the social conditions that would permit him to experiment on the people he was putting to death.

Kevorkian explained this yearning in his 1991 book Prescription Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death, where on page 214 he admitted that assisting "suffering or doomed persons kill themselves" was "merely the first step, an early distasteful professional obligation." Instead of wanting to help the dying, Kevorkian candidly acknowledged, he was actually pursuing his own obsession. "What I find most satisfying," he wrote, "is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish — in a word obitiatry."

Why conduct invasive experiments on people being euthanized? On page 34, he expressed an intense desire to "study all parts of the intact, living brain." Why? On page 243, Kevorkian explained — and it was pure quackery:

If we are ever to penetrate the mystery of death — even superficially — it will have to be through obitiatry...Knowledge about the essence of human death will of necessity require insight into the nature of the unique awareness or consciousness that characterizes cognitive human life. That is possible only through obitiatric research on living human bodies, and most likely by concentrating on the central nervous system...to pinpoint the exact onset of extinction of an unknown cognitive mechanism that energizes life.

Kevorkian's first targets in his quest to slice and dice people were not the ill, but the condemned. He spent years visiting prisons and corresponding with death-row inmates, seeking permission to conduct "obitiatric research" on those being executed.

Only after Kevorkian was thrown out of every prison he visited did he hit upon another angle. If condemned people were not going to be made available for "unfettered experimentation on human death," perhaps he could gain access to experiment on sick and disabled people. His front would be assisted suicide. But his goal would remain human vivisection.

Kevorkian appears to have pursued a three-step plan toward achieving his dream: First, popularize assisted suicide and make it seem acceptable; second, give society a utilitarian stake in assisted suicide by using the victims for organ procurement; and finally, gain permission to conduct his death experiments on the sick and disabled people he would be allowed to kill.

Kevorkian started by placing classified ads in newspapers offering "death counseling." To ensure that he would not be charged with murder, he jerry-rigged a suicide machine that required those whose suicides he was assisting to flip a switch to release deadly potassium chloride or other toxic chemicals into their veins. (When he lost his medical license and access to prescribed drugs, he turned to carbon monoxide as the killing agent.)

It is important to reiterate here that, contrary to the usual media descriptions, most of Kevorkian's victims were not terminally ill. Of the known 130 or so suicides that Kevorkian facilitated, about 70 percent of the people involved were disabled and depressed, the majority of them women. This is not surprising given Kevorkian's disdain for disabled people. He once called quadriplegics and paraplegics who were not suicidal "pathological," and exposed his sympathy for eugenics in a court document, asserting:

The voluntary self-elimination of individual mortally diseased and crippled lives taken collectively can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare.

Ironically, it was Kevorkian's serial assisted suicides of disabled people (to general public applause) that roused the disability-rights community to become the nation's most effective opponent of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Not only were most of Kevorkian's victims not dying, five weren't even sick. These included:

Marjorie Wantz, age 58, Kevorkian's second hastened death, whose emotional and mental difficulties once led to her hospitalization. Wantz sought assisted suicide from Kevorkian, complaining of severe pelvic pain. But her autopsy revealed that she was in splendid physical health.

Rebecca Badger, age 39, sought out Kevorkian to help kill her because she believed she had MS. Her autopsy proved that she did not. Further investigations revealed that Badger was a recovering alcoholic who was suffering from depression and was addicted to pain pills.

Judith Curren, age 42, was an obese woman who abused prescription drugs and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, but her autopsy showed no illness. Shortly before her husband flew her to Kevorkian, she had reported him to the police for violent spouse abuse.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2010 6:02 AM