Jack Kevorkian, aka. Dr Death, assisted suicide advocate. 1928-2011

Jack Kevorkian, who was dubbed "Dr Death" for helping some 130 people to die, has himself died of a pulmonary thrombosis, aged 83, in a Detroit hospital. He had endured a long struggle with heart and kidney problems. "It was peaceful, he didn't feel a thing," said Geoffrey Fieger, his former lawyer, as if summarising in one of the trials prompted by Kevorkian's willingness to test the legal bounds of assisted suicide.

He earned his nickname after he was charged, in 1990, for assisting Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Oregon woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease, to kill herself. At a campsite near Detroit, he hooked Adkins up in the back of his Volkswagen van to a machine he called "the Thanatron", a homemade device that, when the patient pressed a button, dispensed sodium pentathol to knock the patient out, then potassium chloride to kill them.

The state of Michigan sought to press civil charges, but because Adkins in effect killed herself, and Michigan had no laws prohibiting assisted suicide, the charges were eventually dropped, though his licence to practice medicine was revoked in 1991.

Kevorkian's trial became a cause celebre. Fieger compared him to Socrates, while prosecutors warned that this was the first step on the slope to genocide. As Ron Rosenbaum, whose Travels With Doctor Death became a landmark essay, asked: "Is this the trial of Socrates or Dr Mengele?" It was a loaded question that Kevorkian himself often did little to defuse.

He was born Jacob Kevorkian in Pontiac, Michigan, to parents who fled the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. In high school during the second world war, he established his credentials as a contrarian by learning both German and Japanese. After gaining his medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1952, he served as an army doctor, first during the Korean war and then in Colorado, where he taught himself the piano and became a devotee of Bach.

He returned to Pontiac as a hospital pathologist. Then he began proselytising for better use of dead bodies, even going to death row at a prison in Ohio to persuade the convicts to consider euthanasia in the hope that their organs could be reused. Years later he would write articles for a German magazine, Medicine and Law, appearing to condone some doctors in concentration camps because they advanced medical knowledge in the face of otherwise useless destruction. In 1961 he stirred national controversy by using blood from recent cadavers for transfusions. Time magazine called it "blood from the dead".

His career became patchy, employment as a pathologist alternating with an early attempt to set up a computerised diagnostic centre or a scheme to market a new kind of baseball cap. He wrote a number of books and essays, but by the time he set himself up as a "death counsellor" and expert on "bioethics", he had even been rejected as a paramedic. By then, however, he had also developed the Thanatron, using parts collected in junk shops. A later version, called the Mercitron, used carbon monoxide, which Kevorkian said imbued a pinkish tone to the flesh which left the dead body "better looking" than it had been in life.

Outside the realms of death, Kevorkian was an accomplished musician, composing and playing the piano and the flute on The Kevorkian Suite: A Very Still Life, a jazz disc released to bemused reviews in 1997. He also painted, allegedly sometimes using his own blood. A limited print release of six works was issued by a suburban Detroit gallery. One was used as an album cover by the "sludge metal" band Acid Bath.

The Adkins case was the first of six encounters with the law that Kevorkian faced throughout the 1990s, approaching them as increasingly farcical stages for political theatre, even donning 18th-century dress and entering the courtroom in stocks. Critics, however, pointed out cases in which Kevorkian failed to perform due psychiatric diligence, most notoriously one obsese woman with no medical problems, but in an abusive relationship with her former psychiatrist.

His legal odyssesy ended when, in November 1998, he gave the television programme 60 Minutes a film of him administering a lethal injection to Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old man in the final stages of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, who was shown giving his informed consent. Kevorkian dared authorities to stop him, and they responded. He was convicted of second-degree homicide and sentenced to 10-25 years in prison.

He served eight years before being paroled on compassionate grounds while suffering from Hepatitis B, contracted while performing transfusions in Korea. He promised not to advise or help people with their deaths, but resumed being a very vocal public voice, though by now his eccentric profile made him unwelcome in many sectors of the assisted suicide movement.

Following his release, he became popular on the lecture circuit and television talk shows, adding Armenian issues to his topics. He published a prison memoir, GlimmerIQs, which included nonsense rhymes and limericks, and a book about overpopulation called When the People Bubble POPs.

In 2008 he ran for Congress in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and collected nearly 9,000 votes, or 2.6%. In 2010 he was the subject of a documentary film, Kevorkian, directed by Matthew Galkin. The same year Al Pacino won an Emmy for playing Kevorkian in Barry Levinson's HBO television drama You Don't Know Jack.

Kevorkian did not marry, and leaves no survivors. He never minded being called Dr Death. "Everyone is going to die," he said. "Aren't you interested in what's going to happen?"

• Jack (Jacob) Kevorkian, assisted suicide campaigner, born 26 May 1928; died 3 June 2011