Imagine a patient in a hospital suffering from the AIDS disease. And since his diagnosis he has suffered from two bouts of pneumonia, chronic, severe sinus and skin infections, severe seizures, and extreme fatigue. Seventy percent of his vision is already lost, and the disease has gone terminal. He has requested that his doctor prescribe him medicine that would kill him thus ending his suffering. This is exactly what Dr. Jack Kevorkian has been fighting for his entire life. To shed positive light upon the controversial subject of Physician-Assisted Suicide.
A little back story on Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian was the son of Armenian refugees who came to America to escape the Turkish genocide. His early talents ranged from hand-made woodwork, linguistics, to science experiments conducted in his basement. He then became a pathologist, devoting his life to the unusual task of showing the positives and social benefits from death. “He did not just take on the medical establishment and the law; throughout his life he dared to challenge a taboo as old as human civilization – the taboo against death” (Nicol, Wylie 2) Kevorkian was very outspoken and intensely committed to the causes that he believed in. He also lacked the ability to lie, so much, that its said that whenever he played poker with his friends, that he never bluffed, and if he bet everyone else folded.
Kevorkian built a machine where patients, through self implanted pumps, have the ability to self-control the does of pain medication that they receive. And now the amount of doctors who quietly comply with a patient's request for a lethal does of medication is slowly rising up. Kevorkian made headlines by evading countless prosecutions, but then a case came up that no one could ignore, a case where a man so deteriorated due to his illness, that he could not operate the machine properly requiring Kevorkian to