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

Dr. John Lattimer’s claim that JFK displayed a “Thorburn position” is totally wrong, and it showed flagrant ignorance for a medical doctor.  

I found the case that Lattimer based his claim on. It was in a British medical journal from 1898 in which a Dr. Thorburn wrote about a patient he had, a painter who fell off a ladder, slamming his neck into on a metal beam which crushed his spinal cord at the level of C6. All his bodily muscles were instantly and permanently paralyzed, except for the few that were innervated from above that level. There was nothing Dr. Thorburn could do for him. He just lay in his hospital bed for 18 days until he died. He couldn’t eat, but they brought a wet sponge to his mouth regularly to hydrate him. He was unconscious most of the time, and when he did come to, he was delirious.  But, as he lied there, the few muscles he had that still worked slowly shortened until they reached their shortest possible length.

You see, when one muscle contracts, it stretches its opposing muscle. So, if I contract my bicep, my tricep gets stretched, and vice versa. But, if only your bicep works, then it never gets stretched. So, if it shortens a little, say, because I twitch, it’s going to stay shortened.  That’s what happened to Thorburn’s patient. When you don’t have the opposing muscle, you can’t reverse whatever shortening takes place. That’s all it was, and it has no correlation to JFK, who had no spinal cord damage and no paralysis.

 On the left is a drawing of Thorburn’s patient from the journal. So, the muscle tone in his few remaining working muscles gradually shortened them to where he wound up in that position.

It wasn’t a reflex; it was just unopposed muscle tone run amuck.  It wasn’t a reflex for JFK either; it was a panic reaction. He raised his arms in a panic because he had a respiratory obstruction from the throat shot, and he was trying to deal with it.  His actions were voluntary and purposeful. With his left hand, he pulled on his tie to loosen it. With his right hand, he put it over his mouth and coughed- to dislodge the obstruction. And it worked. As soon as he did that, he could breathe OK.

But, his actions were more instinctual and visceral than cerebral. So, it wasn’t a reflex, but it was an instinctual survival response.  There's a difference.

So, what was the obstruction? I asked Dr. David Mantik, and he told me it may have been just a bolus of blood. It wasn’t a bullet because he didn’t cough up a bullet, and there was no bullet in his body.

But, the way Kennedy raised his hands was abnormal. Normally, you raise your hands by supinating your forearm, which is a counter-clockwise rotation which gets the palm of your hand facing you. You only need to lift your hand. You don’t lift your upper arm. So, you do that by turning your forearm and lifting your hand. But, Kennedy contracted his deltoids and thrust his elbows out like wings and lifted everything. So, why did he do it that way? He did it that way because of overexcitement of his nervous system due to the nerve agent. And then when he was finished, he couldn’t put his arms down because they were in spasm due to the nerve agent.  

 So, he just sat there, unable to put his arms down. Jackie tried to press on his arm to coax it down, and it came down a little, but not much. She mostly just tipped him. And his spasticity only spread. It kept getting worse and worse until the fatal head shot put an end to him. That shot essentially killed him instantly. At that point, he was like a chicken with its head cut off; still showing some signs of life but only because his body hadn’t completely shut down but was definitely going to.

JFK exhibited very aberrant behavior in the Zapruder film, both physically and mentally, and it can’t be explained by a shallow wound in his back, affecting no vital tissue, and a puncture wound in his throat that only damaged his trachea some, but did no damage to his brain or spinal cord. JFK’s weird showings in the Zapruder film were all due to poisoning; not to physical trauma. And there is no correlation between JFK and Thorburn’s patient; none whatsoever.