In article , rharris@rt66.com (Robert Harris) writes: >In article <3l2loj$1dge@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com>, GBZN28A@prodigy.com >(Miles Milligan) wrote: > >> I find it curious that the physician that first examined the patient >> stated that the throat wound, over which he-Malcolm Perry-performed a >> tracheotomy, was a wound of entry. > >Miles, > >The Parkland doctors held a news conference shortly after the murder in >which it was unanimously agreed that the neck wound was of entrance. >Interestingly, the NY Times (which had access to the original Zapruder >film) proclaimed that JFK turned completely around to look back at the >TSBD when he was shot in the neck! > The buffs will endlessly push the doctors impression that the wound might have been one of entry, but will not tell you about *all* the speculation the doctors engaged in. For example, the doctors speculated that a fragment from the head shot had *exited* from Kennedy's throat. Let me quote Josiah Thompson: Frazier's suggestion that the throat wound might have been caused by a fragment (possibly bone) has already been made by one of the Parkland doctors who helped Perry make his trachetomy incision. Only three hours after the assassination, Dr. Robert N. McClelland had written an "admission note" in which he had remarked: "The President was at this time comatose from a massive gunshot wound of the head with a fragment wound of the trachea (WCR, p. 526). As another Parkland doctor pointed out in his testimony, the idea of such a fragment driver downward and out the throat by the head impact had been discussed at Parkland Hospital on that Friday afternoon. (SSID, p. 53 Thompson references Carrico's testimony on this latter point (6H5): Mr. Specter: Was there any discussion among the doctors who attended President Kennedy as to the cause of the neck wound? Dr. Carrico: Yes; after that afternoon. Mr. Specter: And what conversations were there? Dr. Carrico: As I recall, Dr. Perry, and I talked and tried after -- later in the afternoon to determine what exactly had happened, and we were not aware of the missle wound to the back, and postulated that this was either a tangential wound from a fragment, possibly another entrance wound. It could have been an exit wound, but we knew of no other entrance wound. Mr. Specter: Was the wound in the neck consistent with being either an entry or exit wound, in your opinion? Dr. Carrico: Yes. Thompson further quotes several sources that echoed this same speculation: This same hypothesis was put forward by various government spokesmen in December, 1963. Citing governmental sources, NEWSWEEK (Dec. 30, 1963), TIME (Dec. 27, 1963), and the WASHINGTON POST (Dec. 18, 1963) all carried stories asserting that the autopsy had produced evidence that a fragment from the second bullet (the head shot) had been deflected downward and had pased out through the throat. THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION (Jan. 4, 1964) reported that "a small fragment of this bullet [the head shot] angled down and passed out through Kennedy's throat. (SSID, p. 53) So what have the buffs been doing with this testimony? They have been *suppressing* the doctors' speculation that the throat wound was the exit wound of a fragment, and *pushing* the doctors speculation that the wound was an entrance wound. The buffs put the former speculation down the Memory Hole, since if people knew about it, they might understand how uncertain and confused the Dallas doctors were, and might doubt that the wound was "clearly" one of entry. Then there is the fact that even if the doctor really *had* clearly believed that the wound was an entrance wound, they could have been mistaken. The following is from the JAMA, April 28, 1993, page 2058. CLINICIANS' FORENSIC INTERPRETATIONS OF FATAL GUNSHOT WOUNDS OFTEN MISS THE MARK. The odds that a trauma specialist will correctly interpret certain fatal gunshot wound are no better than the flip of a coin, according to a recent study at a level 1 trauma center. The study, which looked at single, perforating (exiting) gunshot wounds and multiple gunshot wounds, found that trauma specialists made errors in 52% of the cases, either in differentiating the entrance and exit wound, or in determining the number of bullets that struck the victim. Investigators at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, compared the postmortem findings of a board-certified forensic pathologist with the medical records of emergency medicine physicians, trauma surgeons, and neurosurgeons. The study is the first to quantify the forensic acumen of these specialists, says Vincent DiMaio, MD, a forensic pathologist and editor of THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF FORENSIC MEDICINE AND PATHOLOGY. The study's coauthors . . . investigated the fatal gunshot wounds treated by trauma specialists at the hospital between January 1987 and June 1992. They excluded single penetrating (nonexiting) gunshot wounds from the study. Of the 46 cases identified, 24 had been misinterpreted by the trauma specialists. These included 16 errors in differentiating the exit and entrance wound, and 15 errors in determining the number of bullets. In seven cases, the clinician had made both types of errors. As expected, multiple gunshot wounds were more often misinterpreted--74% of the time. Of the single, perforating gunshot wounds, 37% had been misclassified. The researchers presented their results at the recent annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Boston, Mass. Of course, Kennedy would fall in the "multiple" gunshot wound category. In light of the study, and in light of the confusion and speculation that prevailed among the doctors who had treated Kennedy, it becomes extremely difficult for an honest person to give the *forensic* conclusions of the Dallas doctors much weight. >The doctors started to "change" their opinion about the wound only after >being pressured by the FBI and WC. > > As we have seen, their very earliest opinions were that the wound might have been one of entry, but might *also* have been from a exiting fragment from the head shot. .John