By Alen J. Salerian, MD
One of the saddest aspects of President Kennedy’s assassination has been the unethical and unprofessional conduct of many government physicians, including Dr. George Burkley, the chief White House physician, and Dr. James Humes, the senior pathologist at Bethesda Naval Hospital, at the time of the autopsy. To say that their performance is a blemish for Navy medicine and governmental integrity is a gross understatement.
Dr. George Burkley and Dr. Humes, in writing, admitted that they jointly destroyed part of the autopsy records. Further, some of the most routine aspects of the autopsy were done so poorly to suggest perjured incompetence. The best example is the weight of the president’s brain – which had lost half of its content, weighed 1500 grams, an impossibility with 1500 grams as the average brain weight. Brain autopsy did not include cross-sectioning, a major deficit. There was no careful documentation of how the entry wound on JFK’s throat was probed. Mysteriously or not so mysteriously, a bullet recovered from JFK’s body disappeared either during or immediately after the autopsy. If none of the above inconsistencies seemed accidental, the disappearance of JFK’s occipital bone, the Harper fragment, left no doubt that some people, for whatever reason, did not want forensic evidence to help resolve JFK’s homicidal death. The Harper fragment found by a medical student at Dealey Plaza the day after the assassination was photographed by Dr. Cairn, the chief pathologist at Methodist Hospital, who concluded that this piece represented a part of the occipital bone of JFK’s skull. Dr. Burkley took over the Harper fragment and later it disappeared. Dr. Cairn, of course, did not know that the Parkland doctors had observed a sizeable hole in the back of the president’s skull consistent with an occipital location. The findings of the Parkland Hospital doctors and the opinion of the chief pathologist of Methodist Hospital greatly increase the likelihood that, indeed, the Harper fragment was from JFK’s occipital bone and very likely supportive of a conspiracy, for Oswald, from his position, could not have caused the damage consistent with a frontal entry wound
Doctors are not supposed to lie. No doctor should remain a doctor and violate the Hippocratic Oath. JFK’s autopsy is a sad statement that, indeed, at least two doctors violated their sacred oath.
