ER doctor at JFK's assassination tells his story

From the Casper Star Tribune, excerpted below...

Only a small number of eyewitnesses to the JFK assassination are alive today, and even fewer of the team of ER doctors on staff at Parkland Hospital that day are able to tell their stories.

Saturday at the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association Conference at the Holiday Inn in Casper, neurosurgeon Dr. Phil Williams, M.D., spoke of his experiences on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

"Even though it was 40 years ago, it is still a part of our lives," said Williams, who was on staff at Parkland Hospital that day. A few hands raised when Williams asked who in the crowd of neurosurgeons could remember the exact place they stood when Kennedy was shot.

"The next thing we remember like that in our history is 9/11," Williams said.

In September of 1963, Williams was put in charge of the emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where only two months later, President Kennedy would be brought to die. Williams had just graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans, returning to his hometown of Dallas for his internship. On Fridays around noon, Williams said he usually went to the ER to tend to the patients, but on that particular Friday, he was at a conference on the third floor above the ER.

A little after noon, Williams and his colleagues heard pages for some of the most important doctors at Parkland, but shrugged them off. A few minutes later, another intern stuck his head through the conference room door and said that President Kennedy and then Gov. John Connally were in the ER with gunshot wounds.