The University of Michigan’s medical system recently celebrated infamous alumnus Dr. Jack Kevorkian as one of its “best” alumni, leading to a rebuke from two professors.
A Michigan court convicted Kevorkian, now deceased, after he killed someone via so-called “assisted suicide.” Kevorkian (pictured) also advocated for unethical medical experiments on prisoners, which led to him being kicked out of medical residency. Or in the words of Michigan Medicine, he “changed the national conversation on physician-assisted suicide.”
English Professor Scott Lyons and medical school Professor Dr. Kristin Collier noted “Kevorkian is best known for his interest in euthanasia.”
Kevorkian also “advocated ending the lives of vulnerable people by illness and disability and became a symbol of the physician-assisted suicide movement. His work resulted in a murder conviction and prison term,” the pair wrote in an opinion piece for The Michigan Daily.
The pair also pointed out the “grave moral error” of celebrating Kevorkian, and by extension, suicide.
“Kevorkian’s legacy at the University is important because public institutional memories articulate institutional values,” Lyons and Collier wrote. “Celebrating Kevorkian would suggest that the medical school is in favor of suicide.”
They continued:
At its core, medicine has always been grounded in the principle of “do no harm,” which means one does not relieve suffering by eliminating the sufferer. Directly enabling the death of a patient under a doctor’s care is antithetical to any coherent understanding of medicine as a vocation that does no harm. It is distressing that Medicine at Michigan chose to highlight someone whose entire body of work militates against the core foundations of medicine as a healing profession.
“Michigan Medicine should remember and celebrate its best, not its worst,” the pair concluded.
