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Chapter 30. The End of the Show
- Michigan State University Press
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213 Chapter 30 The end of the show Come, friend Watson, the curtain rings up for the last act. —sherLoCK hoLMes, THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN ernest hemingway wasn’t out of the hospital for long. Depression still squeezed him in its serrated jaws. in the spring of 1961, just as Percy Julian was selling his steroid-manufacturing company, Julian Laboratories, to smith, Kline, and french for more than $2 million,1 hemingway attempted suicide again and wound up rehospitalized in saint Marys hospital. his subsequent treatment reportedly involved more electroconvulsive therapy.2 hemingway’s seemingly premature release from this hospitalization has provided endless fodder for conspiracy buffs. Why did his doctors let him out when they did? had he feigned just enough psychiatric improvement to get himself dismissed?3 Did he leave against medical advice? or was his depression actually under good control at the time of his discharge, only to relapse later as depression often does?4 once freed from saint Marys, the writer departed Minnesota for the last time and withdrew to his retirement home in Ketchum, idaho. hemingway, like Lew sarett—the man who first synthesized cortisone—retired in idaho to pursue hunting and fishing. But there would be no more of either for the nobel-winning writer. on July 2, 1961,5 ernest hemingway unsheathed his favorite shotgun, a 12-gauge model purchased from Abercrombie & fitch, and killed himself.6 214| Chapter 30 ortho Pharmaceutical Company marketed its first birth control pill in 1963: 2.3 million women were already using the increasingly popular prescription steroid contraceptives. nobody remembers where they were on the day that the new pill was introduced. But everybody over fifty-five years of age remembers where they were on november 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. central standard time—the moment John f. Kennedy was shot. More precisely, shot twice. According to the Warren Commission, the first shot, which passed through Kennedy’s neck, might not have been fatal. But rather than collapsing into the relative protection of his limousine’s deep rear seat, Kennedy remained an erect target for the next round. Moments later a second bullet shattered the right side of his skull. Authorities have speculated that Kennedy remained upright and exposed to the second round because of the rigid back brace he wore to support a spine that had been ravaged by chronic steroid use.7 if so, Kennedy’s Addison ’s disease—and the cortisone that may have both caused and treated it—played a secondary role in his death. Another small controversy in the most controversial assassination of the century. Luis Alvarez, the problem child from rochester, Minnesota—now a nationally famous scientist—was soon brought in as a part of the JfK investigation. no stranger to presidents (he had developed an indoor golf training machine to help improve the game of President eisenhower), Alvarez was invited by the Warren Commission to provide input on Kennedy’s assassination. As one of the nation’s leading particle physicists, Alvarez was considered an expert in the areas of “trajectory” and “ballistics.” his assignment from the committee was to analyze the famous Abraham Zapruder film showing Kennedy’s head at the moment of projectile impact. Alvarez’s testimony supported one of the most critical conclusions of the Warren Commission—the opinion that the fatal shots had indeed come from behind Kennedy despite the sharp, backward movement of the president’s head at the time of impact.8 Years later, in the september 1976 issue of the American Journal of Physics , Alvarez published a detailed article describing “the odd behavior” of Kennedy’s head.9 using experiments performed on melons, as well as his own simple theories regarding the “law of conservation of momentum,” he demonstrated that the paradoxical backward motion of Kennedy’s head was the result of recoil caused by the explosive, forward ejection of the president’s brain as a result of the bullet’s impact. it was a careful, detailed, [3.88.254.50] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:34 GMT) The End of the Show| 215 hard-to-refute explanation for one of the most controversial pieces of expert testimony provided to the Warren Commission. san francisco was known for its “summer of Love” in 1967. now it was time for some other Bay Area “locals”—with their own steroid connections —to grab the headlines. Dr. norman shumway of nearby stanford university performed the first successful adult heart transplant in the united...