Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

The Destruction of the Thorburn Hypothesis

by Ralph C. Cinque D.C.

I paid the $38 and obtained Thorburn's article. He described several cases in which patients who had suffered severe cervical trauma exhibited different degrees of numbness and paralysis. His first case is the one that became famous, but I use that word guardedly. 

It's famous among JFK buffs, but that's it. It was Dr. John Lattimer, a urologist, who made the parallel between Thorburn's patient and JFK. It was Lattimer who coined "Thorburn position" and tried to get it into the medical lexicon.

But, it didn't take. If you go to PubMed, the largest medical database in the world and you type in "Thorburn position" you get 9 results, none of them related to this. All of them just regard other people named Thorburn. 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Thorburn+position

If you just search for "Thorburn" alone, you get many more, but they're still unrelated.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Thorburn

I scanned through several pages and saw nothing relating to Dr. William Thorburn of the 19th century. Your results may vary because it's always a fresh search, but I expect you'll do no better. 

Thorburn's patient was up on a ladder, and the rung he was standing on gave out, and he fell backwards as one of his feet remained caught in the ladder. So, he pivoted backwards, and his neck slammed into a bench that was 2 1/2 feet above the ground. He was rendered unconscious and remained so for several hours. When he came to, he discovered that his legs were completely paralyzed and his arms partially so. 

He was admitted to the hospital 4 days later. That's when Thorburn found that all the man's muscles were paralyzed except for four: the biceps, the brachialis, supinator longus, and the deltoid.  

Everybody knows about the biceps. The brachialis is a muscle next to it, deeper to it, that helps to flex the elbow joint. The deltoid is the muscle that caps your shoulder, and it lifts your arm away from your torso; it abducts. Today, the supinator longus is called the brachioradialis, and it's in the forearm. It has a complicated action which includes elbow flexion, and usually it supinates the forearm, which means turn it outward. Here is a picture of all 4 muscles.

   

Now, here's the important thing: Thorburn never said that those muscles were in spasm. He didn't say that they were reflexly contracting. He just said that those muscles retained their innervation while all the other muscles were paralyzed. 

In the above picture, the man doesn't look like he is in spasm. It doesn't look like he has any exertion going on at all, does it? So, why would his arms be positioned like that? 

It's simply because the other muscles, the antagonist muscles, were paralyzed. Look at the chart of the arm muscles again. You see the Triceps in back? The Triceps have to contract to reverse the flexion of the elbow. They couldn't do it because they were paralyzed. 

This whole case was much simpler than we've been led to believe. There is no such thing as a "Thorburn position". You simply had muscles which had lost their innervation and muscles which kept their innervation. The muscles that kept their innervation kept their muscle tone, which refers to the very low-grade tension existing in a muscle all the time even when it's at rest. There is muscle tone even when you are asleep. And that muscle tone was unopposed by muscle tone in the opposing muscles. Hence, the tendency for muscle creep to take place. 

Think of it like a tug of war with a rope. There's a tug of war going on in your body between opposing muscles. But, in this case, the other team gave up. The tone in the remaining muscles was therefore unopposed. 

Even when he was moved around passively, say by attendants, it would have activated stretch receptors in his few working muscles, and that would have caused a contractile response. There was nothing opposing it, and he didn't have the means to reverse it.

If you are going draw a principle from this it is that if you've only got a few muscles working, then they will contract and shorten because they're unopposed. Think of it like an engine that is idling in neutral. It isn't going anywhere, but it's running. Well, your muscles are also idling in neutral; their engine is running; they're turned on. If there is nothing pulling the other way, they're bound to contract some and shorten. That is what muscles do, and that's all we're seeing here.    

But, it's a slow process not a sudden one. The innervated muscle would creep shorter over time from being unopposed, but it wouldn't spring into spasm.  

It went downhill for this guy. Initially, he had some feeling in his arms, but he lost it. And eventually he lost innervation to his deltoid, so the abduction stopped, but the elbows flexion persisted. It became laborious for him to breathe; he had to struggle to get enough air. That's because all he had to breathe with was his diaphragm. All of his skeletal respiratory muscles were paralyzed. He had terrible bed sores. He deteriorated mentally to where he was confused and delirious. And then, exhausted, he died.  

The autopsy showed that his spinal cord had been compressed and flattened at the level of C5. Think of it like a thick wad of licorice that someone squeezed with a pair of pliers. He had comminuted (multiple) fractures of C5 and C6, while the intervertebral disc between them was also broken.  The spinal cord was soft and mushy for two inches above the trauma site and one inch below. That's a lot of damage. 

How does that compare to Kennedy? It doesn't. No spinal fractures were reported on JFK. John Lattimer, who was neither a pathologist nor a radiologist but a urologist, said he saw a shadow that may have indicated that the transverse process of C7 was grazed. Here is Lattimer's exact statement:

"No gross fractures were visible, although a 'graze' of the tip of the transverse process of the seventh cervical vertebra could not be excluded."

That's it! One guy, with no expertise, with no official capacity, musing about something that no expert saw. And there is NO CHANCE that it's true because Kennedy was hit much lower than C7. 

Let's look at Kennedy's actions. Here he is shortly before he disappears behind the Stemmons freeway sign. He hasn't been shot yet. Notice that his hand is raised. That isn't a reflex. That's just him waving. 

Now, let's look at him at his first showing upon emerging from behind the sign, frame 225. He's been shot.

So, his arm is lower, not higher. Look at them side by side:

He got shot in-between, and we don't know the position of his arm at the moment he got shot, but at our first sighting of him post-trauma, his arm is lower. Let's jump to frame 230.

Here his arms are elevated but not to the same level. His right hand is over his mouth and his left hand looks like it may be pulling on his tie. In Thorburn's patient, most of his muscles were paralyzed, but what signs of paralysis are there on Kennedy? None! He's sitting upright. His arm muscles are working. His shoulder muscles are working, as you can see him hunching. His head is back, so his posterior cervical muscles are working. Everything is working, including his postural muscles. There is no reason to think that anything we are seeing is a pathological reflex. And there is no reason to think that anything we are seeing is a duplication of what happened to Thorburn's patient.

By frame 250, Kennedy's right arm had come down quite a bit. 

Look at them side by side:

So, it was an involuntary reflex spasm, but it started letting up in just 1 second? (There were 18 seconds per frame and this was 20 frames, so that's 1 1/9 seconds). Here it is exactly 1 second after that:

So, it's come down some more. It's lower yet. From there, the camera shifts, and we can see less. Here it is a second after that:

Notice that he's hunching his shoulders, and there's a lot of muscle tension going on. Think of it like a startle reaction, or what is called "fight or flight". That's what we're seeing here. 

Then, a second later, it's about the same as he's leaning towards Jackie, leaning towards comfort.

And then half a second after that, it was all over:

So, here are the talking points about the Thorburn hypothesis:

1) Wikipedia defines muscle tone (residual muscle tension or tonus) as "the continuous and passive partial contraction of the muscles." Thorburn's patient had a few muscles with muscle tone, and since they were unopposed by other muscles which were paralyzed, they naturally shortened. But what does that have to do with Kennedy? Nothing! What muscles of Kennedy were paralyzed? And what could have paralyzed them since there was no evidence of cord damage or nerve damage? 

2) Kennedy was shot in the throat, and it's only natural to bring your hands to an area that's in trouble. I am reminded of an experience from Catholic school. The monks used to paddle us on the butt- the bare butt. That's right, they would have us drop-trou, including underpants. This one kid, Ricky, was paddled a lot, just for getting wrong answers, and he had the habit of swinging his hand back to his butt in sympathy. He couldn't resist doing it. One day, Brother Raymond broke his hand with that paddle. Not on purpose. He started swinging, and Ricky's sympathy hand swifted back there in time to catch the paddle.  

3) But, there may have been more to it than that. Gil Jesus suggests that JFK may have brought his right hand to his mouth trying to "cough up a bullet". And he may have been tugging on his tie with his left hand to make it easier to breathe. You know how a tight tie can obstruct breathing- there's truth to that. If you haven't watched Gil's video, you need to watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpFHYwot6bk

4) Kennedy was shot in the upper back by a sharply descending bullet (it went down, not up), so there is no way it could have affected the cervical nerves that were affected in Thorburn's patient to produce the same result. 

5) The very high level of globalized muscle tension in Kennedy was part of a stress reaction mediated by stress hormones, a "fight or flight" response, and it was not limited to the few muscles that were affected in the Thorburn case. The movement of JFK's arms were no more a "reflex" than the hunching of his shoulders. 

The bottom line is that there is no truth to the Thorburn hypothesis. It's just another example of the extreme desperation of those who for 50 years have been trying to defend the official story of the JFK assassination.