Kevorkian, Dr. Death, Passes Away at 83

He furthered the controversy behind his name in 1961 by publishing an article in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology revealing his experiments with direct transfusions of cadaver blood into volunteers. As a former Army volunteer, he saw the potential benefits his research could have for battlefield casualties in Vietnam. To his disappointment, the military rejected his proposal. Kevorkian transferred from job to job throughout his career, including playing the role of staff pathologist at the Beverly Hills Medical Center in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. In 1982, he took a job at the last known hospital he was employed at in Michigan as an assistant to the chief pathologist at Pacific Hospital of Long Beach (McLellan). .
             Unable to keep a job for long when he was able to get a job at all left Kevorkian in dire straits. In The Times story, Kevorkian was depicted as a "lifelong bachelor living off his savings in a tiny, ill-furnished, walk-up apartment in Royal Oak, Michigan, not far from his boyhood home in Pontiac." The Times also reported that he had become "increasingly dominated by the issue of suicide for the terminally ill" (McLellan). .
             With no outlet left to continue his research in pathology, Kevorkian began making a suicide machine out of scrap parts. On his business card, he described himself as "The world's first obitiatrist," derived from the word "obituary." He attempted to advertise his newfound business in the Detroit-area newspapers and in medical journals but to no avail. He garnered little publicity from the Detroit Free Press and a few other publications that described his business as bizarre. However, one of these small publications, Newsweek, caught the attention of Ronald and Janet Adkins and began Kevorkian's long career in assisted suicide (McLellan).
             Janet Adkins, a 54-year old resident of Portland, Oregon and mother of three adult sons, was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease but didn't want it to progress any further.