Return of Dr Death

Dr Death stalks the bleak streets of suburban Detroit once more. This time, he promises not to kill. But he is still certain to muddy any rational debate on the question of how we should die in the 21st century.

Jack Kevorkian, 80 in May, is the retired pathologist who earned his soubriquet in a 10-year campaign of 'mercy killing', assisting suicides as a form of euthanasia in defiance of the law.

He got out of jail last June and has now announced he plans to run for Congress in Oakland, where he lives not far from the old Ford car factory, on the Right to Die ticket. Which has put him right back in the headlines. "Euthanasia, the right to die, has got to be legalised," he told the local TV station, his face more skull-like than ever. "I'll work to have it legalised. But I won't break any laws doing it."

When 'Dr Death' (above) in was locked up in 1998 on a 10–to-25-year sentence for manslaughter, he boasted of having 'assisted' in the suicide of 130 people, invariably poor and drab and at a loss. It was a great story. He would scurry past the television cameras, dressed in his cheap blue windcheater, flaunting his monk-like asceticism, clutching the big square bag holding his Death Machine.

This was the ethics of medicine and mortality recast as comic-book culture. He finally went too far when he invited CBS cameras to witness the euthanasia of Thomas Youk, 52, suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.

The debate calmed down with Dr Death behind bars. There have been no stampedes to Holland or Oregon where the rules have evolved, nor tales of abuse. The Australian ethicist Peter Singer at Princeton University raises relevant but awkward questions on who should live and who should die, while in Britain Mary Warnock and Elisabeth Macdonald can publish Easeful Death (reviewed by Diana Athill on The First Post last week) without outrage.

But Kevorkian was never interested in ethics or reason. He is interested in death. I interviewed him before his arrest. We toured a local art gallery showing his paintings: they were the first clue to an adolescent exhibitionist. He described how he had grown up among Armenian genocide survivors with death a daily conversation. As a medical intern, he worked the night shift to spend his time looking for the moment of death in the eyes of the dying.

He is for ever the boy trying to get attention by pulling the wings off insects. "Everyone is fascinated by death," he told me. "It is just that very few admit it."

Kevorkian is half-right. That is why he became a celebrity, why thousands of people wrote to him in jail, and why he might well gather the 3,000 signatures he needs to run for Congress.

Dr Death is himself dying now, of diabetes, hepatitis C and hardening arteries in his brain. He has been depressed. One more dance on the public stage will cheer him up. Then he should call for volunteers, and get it over with. ·