Mercy's Friend or Foe?

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Dr. Jack Kevorkian has spent much of his medical life searching for ways to make better use of human bodies, especially dead ones. Thirty years ago, as a young pathologist in Pontiac, Michigan, he became the first doctor to transfuse blood directly from a corpse into a live patient. He marveled at the possible uses -- on battlefields, for instance, or during a natural disaster -- and lamented the fact that public distaste for the procedure would probably preclude its clinical acceptance.

Over time he turned his attention to patients who were soon to be dead, looking to salvage whatever he could. The execution of condemned murderers seemed an extravagant waste, since controversial drugs and surgical techniques could be tested on criminal volunteers. The prisoner's brain provided a unique opportunity to study a criminal mind -- "an intact, living" brain, he emphasized. Further, from each prisoner might be harvested enough organs to save half a dozen lives. He has proposed an auction market in which rich people would bid for organs, and the money could be used to provide them to the poor for free.

Before long he found that his pathological interests precluded his being hired by any hospital. His ostracism, however, did leave him more time to rummage around flea markets, looking for old toys with small gears that he could use to build his inventions. His first "Mercitron," a precursor to the carbon-monoxide delivery contraption he provided to two more suicidal women last week, now sits in his lawyer's office. "He's very skilled in mechanical engineering," says Geoffrey Fieger. "He's very talented, in everything he builds."

Forced retirement also left him more time for painting, a hobby he has enjoyed for many years. His artistic tastes run to the surreal; one painting is called Nausea. Another, Coma. A third, an allegorical study of genocide, is set in a frame that, by various accounts, was either painted red to look like blood or painted in actual human blood that Kevorkian salvaged from outdated samples at the local blood bank, and from his own arm.

Kevorkian has become the kind of fanatic who could prompt people who share his views to change their minds. Two out of three Americans say they think doctors should be allowed to help desperately sick patients commit suicide, a cause for which Kevorkian has become the most celebrated champion. But as he appears on television after each new death, invoking a higher moral authority and ignoring court orders and judges' instructions, Kevorkian begins to embody all the warnings about how euthanasia, once unleashed, could get out of hand. "It's almost become obligatory for people who write or speak about the subject to distance themselves from Kevorkian," says Professor Yale Kamisar at the University of Michigan law school, who has followed the doctor's career for years. "They say, 'I'm not in favor of what Kevorkian is doing, but . . .' "