Who2 Editorial Blog
Notes and Commentary from the Editors
Friday, June 19, 2009
A Fascinating Guy You Never Heard Of
We stumbled on this obituary from the New York Times, published in May of 2007. It's about Dr. John K. Lattimer, a urologist and Columbia University professor.Lattimer lived to be 92 years old. A 6' 4" track star as a college kid, he was an army doctor in World War II and treated high-level Nazis during the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Besides his medical career, Lattimer was a ballistics expert who was picked by the Kennedy family in 1972 to examine autopsy photos and X-rays of the body of President John F. Kennedy.
And he collected historical memorabilia -- his possessions included drawings by Adolf Hitler, a sword that belonged to Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen and a penis said to have once been attached to Napoleon.
A fascinating life.
Labels: John K. Lattimer, Obituary
Posted by Mr. Hehn at 9:13 AM 
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3 Comments:
Jeepers, what a guy.
Here's an angle I never heard of before:
"Dr. Lattimer’s wartime experiences also prompted him to write a somewhat controversial book based, in large part, on his assignment to the medical team at the Nuremberg trials. The book, “Hitler’s Fatal Sickness and Other Secrets of the Nazi Leaders” (Hippocrene Books, 1999), records his professional impressions of the men and their conditions.
It includes a long chapter concluding that Hitler suffered from advanced Parkinson’s disease — probably the “faster moving post-encephalitic” type, Dr. Lattimer wrote — based on reports of Hitler’s tremors, first in the left hand, then spreading to other limbs, and his well-documented attacks of rage."
Reminds me of the "attack of rage" in the bunker scene from that German production a few years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2fl-sHUwrc
In which his hands DO shake while he's taking off his glasses. Is that accepted wisdom about Hitler now, I wonder?
I thought it was interesting that they spent that much ink on the "controversial" book that said Hitler had Parkinson's, but kind of glide over Lattimer's view that the Warren Commission was wrong about JFK's death.
I had to go back and reread that part of the story, which I had taken the opposite way.
"A front-page New York Times article, with a photograph of Dr. Lattimer, quoted him saying that the images 'eliminate any doubt completely' about the validity of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald fired all the shots that struck the president."
I had read that to mean that Lattimer was *supporting* the Warren findings. Now I see it could mean exactly the opposite.
Or maybe he was just being coy?
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