Malcolm Perry (physician)
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Malcolm Oliver Perry (born 1929 in Allen, Texas) is an American physician and surgeon. Perry was the first doctor to attend to President of the United States John F. Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital on 22 November 1963.
Perry graduated from Plano High School in 1947 and went on to the University of Texas at Austin. Following his graduation in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts, Perry went to Southwestern Medical School, becoming a doctor in 1955. Perry worked as an intern at Letterman Hospital in San Francisco, California, for a year, before joining the United States Air Force for two years. Perry was stationed at Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington.
Following the end of his military duties, Perry worked at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas, for four years as a general surgical resident. Although from September 1962 to September 1963, he traveled to the University of California at San Francisco to study vascular surgery. At this point, he became board certified by the American Board of Surgery.
When John F. Kennedy was shot on 22 November, 1963, he was taken to Parkland Hospital. Perry was the first doctor to attend to Kennedy, performing a tracheotomy over the small wound in Kennedy's throat. In performing this procedure, Perry inadvertently destroyed crucial ballistics evidence concerning the direction of the bullet that hit the president. Perry also rendered aid to Texas Governor John Connally on that same day.
Perry thrice stated at a press conference later that day that the wound appeared to be an entrance wound. However, when interviewed by the Warren Commission, Perry said that he now believed that a "full jacketed bullet without deformation passing through the skin would leave a similar wound for an exit and entrance wound and with the facts which you have made available and with these assumptions, I believe that it was an exit wound."
Following the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, Perry was one of the doctors to tend to Oswald. Following Oswald's death, Perry made an effort to leave the Dallas area in order to avoid the many press conferences and press questions. Perry left for McAllen, Texas, the home of his mother-in-law, but was followed there by a reporter from United Press International. Subsequently, a news story was published about him in the New York Herald-Tribune which Perry characterized as "overly dramatic, garish and in poor taste, and ethically damaging to me."
Perry later became chief of vascular surgery at New York-Cornell Hospital in Manhattan from 1978 to 1988. He is currently professor emeritus at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
