With Jack Kevorkian commanding headlines through the 1990s, Lori Roscoe, a University of South Florida communications professor, analyzed dozens of his assisted suicide cases as part of her research on end-of-life care.
Her students of recent years, however, barely knew who he was, she said.
Kevorkian died early Friday at a Royal Oak, Mich., hospital. He was 83.
That lack of awareness changed with last year's HBO movie "You Don't Know Jack," in which Al Pacino played Kevorkian as a kind of folk hero. The portrayal surprised Roscoe.
Kevorkian forced "us as individuals and health care providers to take end-of-life care seriously," she said.
But his work also had a dark side.
Roscoe studied the cases of 69 of the men and women whose deaths Kevorkian assisted. Her research was published in 2000 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
She found that only 25 percent of the patients were within six months of death, one of the primary criteria for being considered terminally ill. Some had psychological problems that may have affected their judgment.
But Kevorkian was convinced he was doing the right thing, Roscoe said.
"Kevorkian did not feel that anyone should second guess another person's suffering, and I believe he saw his goal as relieving suffering," she said.
Though "he did propel hospice growth and attention to end-of-life issues," she said, "I think we still haven't gotten very far" in helping terminally ill patients who don't want aggressive treatment but don't meet the six-month criteria for Medicare hospice benefits.
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