Prescription Medicide

By Jack Kevorkian

Book Overview

For many years Dr. Kevorkian was at the center of the red-hot debate over physician-assisted suicide. The inventor of the "suicide machine" stirred up both admiration and controversy. His "Deaths with Dignity" won him the accolades of the pro-choice movement. Other groups, like Operation Rescue, the AMA, the Hemlock Society, and especially the Michigan State Legislature, insisted that Kevorkian had gone too far. His much-publicized campaign to assist the terminally ill to commit suicide eventually led to his prosecution and imprisonment.In Prescription: Medicide, the famed "suicide doctor" talks about why he was so committed to his struggle. He addresses the need to assist the terminally ill to die, how death row inmates should be allowed to donate organs after their deaths, and the need for medical reform to create a rational program of dignified, humane, beneficial planned death.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879758724
• ISBN13: 9780879758721
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Eye Opener

This book is not only an eye opener but it also expresses Kevorkian frustration with the governments control over medicine. It's kind of nice to see that old people have issues they like to fight for as well. At one point talks of his quest to encourage the government to allow peoplle on death row to donate their bodies to science but the government. Kevorkian is a good man and it saddens me to think what the media has done to him.

a commonsensical discussion of important issues

``Dr. Death'' got his start with campaigns to allow death row inmates to donate their organs (currently organ donation is impossible). If you take a heart, a liver, two kidneys, two corneas, and bone marrow from a willing donor with a known execution date, and you can save quite a few lives with his death.It's common-sense arguments like these, not grisly death-obsession, that makes this book worth reading. I expect that some readers will find the sections on euthanasia distasteful, but the subject is handled carefully and smartly. For all his faults, Kevorkian is a strong and articulate voice who is too often written off automatically as a crank and a murderer. Read this book in order to balance your perspective, then judge him if you wish.