The doctor's weird theatrics added up, just like the bodies Detroit Free Press, May 29, 2007 DETROIT - When the odd little man with the sharp nose and the rusty Volkswagen bus began helping people die -- sometimes two a day -- the world turned its eyes to Michigan as the new frontier in the right-to-die movement. Seventeen years later, the movement is dead, or close to it, even as states like California and Oregon have pushed forward. The great irony in the story of Jack Kevorkian may be that in his zeal and penchant for high drama and the macabre, he likely euthanized his own crusade in his home state. "I think in the end he did more harm than good on balance," said Dr. Howard Brody, a medical ethicist and physician who chaired Michigan's Commission on Death and Dying, a 22-member panel created in 1993 by a desperate Legislature as the bodies of Kevorkian's clients piled up. The panel was charged with studying assisted suicide and end-of-life issues, and proposing legislation to either regulate assisted suicide or ban it. After a year, the commission failed to reach a consensus but did provide a 200-page report urging better care of terminal and chronically ill patients. Brody, now director of the Medical Humanities Institute at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston, said Kevorkian's weakness as a champion of physician-assisted suicide may have been his unwillingness to support restrictions most people want to see when it comes to helping people die.