Treatment of O.K. Corral lawmen

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

 

Goodfellow's father, Milton J. Goodfellow, came to California in 1853 to mine for gold. His mother, Amanda Baskin Goodfellow, followed two years later by boat, mule across the Isthmus of Panama, and then again by boat, arriving in San Francisco on the steamship S.S. Golden Gate. Goodfellow was born on December 23, 1855 in Downieville, California, then one of the largest cities in the state. His parents also had two daughters, Mary Catherine ("Kitty") and Bessie. His father became a mining engineer and maintained an interest in medicine. Goodfellow grew up around California Gold Rush mining camps and developed a deep interest in both mining and medicine. When he was 12, his parents sent him across the country to a private school in Pennsylvania. He returned to California two years later where he attended the California Military Academy in Oakland. He was then accepted to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied civil engineering for one year before he applied to the United States Naval Academy. In 1870, he was living with his family in Treasure City, Nevada, where his father was a mining superintendent.

FAMILY

On November 4, 1876, Goodfellow married Katherine ("Kate") Colt, daughter of Henry Tracy Colt, the proprietor of Meadville's Colt House,^] whom he had met while reading medicine in Meadville. Ironically, she was a cousin to Samuel Colt, inventor of the Colt revolver, a weapon that would later play a significant role in Goodfellow's medical practice. The Goodfellows left Meadville immediately after they were married, during the week of November 9, 1876, and traveled to Oakland, California.

The Goodfellows had a daughter, Edith,^[1] born on October 22, 1879 in Oakland. They also had a son, George Milton, born in May 1882 in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, who died from "general bleeding" on July 18. Kate Goodfellow died on August 16, 1891, at her mother-in-law's home in Oakland. Goodfellow and his daughter Edith caught the train to Oakland from Benson, Arizona, and when his wife died, he and Edith returned to Tombstone before he relocated to Tucson and took over the practice of his deceased friend, Dr. John C. Handy. Goodfellow married again, to Mary Elizabeth, sometime before March 1906.

 

Medical education

Concerned about disappointing his father, Goodfellow sought out his cousin, Dr. T.H. Lashells, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and read for medicine. He found he had a ready aptitude for the medical field and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where an uncle lived. He attended Wooster University Medical School and on February 23, 1876,^]he graduated with honors.

Goodfellow briefly opened a medical practice in Oakland. He was soon invited by his father to join him in Yavapai County, Arizona Territory, where Milton was a mining executive for Peck, Mine and Mill. Goodfellow worked in Prescott as the company physician for the next two years^[1] until he secured permission to serve with George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry. His orders to join the unit were delayed, however, and he missed the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, at which most of the unit was destroyed. Instead, Goodfellow joined the U.S. Army as acting assistant surgeon at Fort Whipple in Prescott. In 1879, he became for a brief period the contract surgeon at Fort Lowell near Tucson.

MEDICAL PRACTICE.

In 1880, Goodfellow decided to open his own medical practice. On September 15, he canceled his Army contract and he and his wife relocated to the silver mining boomtown of Tombstone, in Cochise County, Arizona Territory. The town was less than a year old but its population had exploded from about 100 residents in March 1879, when it consisted mostly of wooden shacks and tents; by the fall of 1879 more than a thousand hardy miners and merchants lived in a canvas-and-matchstick camp built on top of the richest silver strike in the United States, and by the time Goodfellow arrived, the town had a population of more than 2,000. There were already 12 doctors practicing in Tombstone, but only Goodfellow and three others had medical school diplomas.

At age 25, Goodfellow opened an office on the second floor of the Crystal Palace Saloon, one of the most luxurious saloons in the West. It was also the location of offices for other notable officials, including County Coroner Dr. H.M. Mathews, Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp, attorney George W. Berry, Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan, and Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer When he was not busy tending to patients, Goodfellow walked down the outside stairs to the saloon below, where he spent many hours drinking, playing faro, and betting on horse races, foot races, wrestling and boxing matches. He reportedly got along well with all of the town's diverse social classes, from the hardscrabble miners to the wealthy elite, as well as characters like the notoriously drunk lawyer Allen English.

Goodfellow lost his office when the saloon and most of downtown Tombstone burned to the ground during a large fire on May 26, 1882. The building was quickly rebuilt and the Crystal Palace earned a reputation for its gambling, entertainment, food and the best brands of wines, liquors, and cigars available 24 hours a day. Goodfellow cared for the indigent and was reimbursed by the county at the rate of $8,000 to $12,000 per year.

Tombstone was a dangerous frontier town at the time and the scene of considerable conflict that produced many of Goodfellow's patients. Most of the leading cattlemen as well as numerous local outlaws, including the Cowboys, were Confederate sympathizers and Democrats from Southern states, especially Missouri and Texas. The mine and business owners, miners, city lawmen including brothers Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp, and most of the other townspeople were largely Republicans from the Northern states. There was also the fundamental conflict over resources and land, of traditional, Southern-style, “small government” agrarianism of the rural Cowboys contrasted to Northern-style industrial capitalism. The Tombstone Daily Journal asked in March 1881 how a hundred outlaws could terrorize the best system of government in the world, asking, "Can not the marshal summon a posse and throw the ruffians out?" Goodfellow later famously described Tombstone as the "condensation of wickedness."

 

Treatment of O.K. Corral lawmen

During the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp was shot through the calf and Assistant Deputy U.S. Marshal Morgan Earp was shot across both shoulder blades. Doc Holliday was grazed by a bullet. Goodfellow treated both Earps' wounds. Cowboy Billy Clanton, who had been mortally wounded in the shootout, asked someone to remove his boots before he died; Goodfellow was present and obliged.

After the gunfight, Ike Clanton filed murder charges against the Earps and Doc Holliday. Goodfellow reviewed Dr. H.M. Mathew's autopsy reports on the three outlaw Cowboys the Earps and Holiday had killed: Billy Clanton and brothers Tom and Frank McLaury. Goodfellow's testimony about the nature of Billy Clanton's wounds during the hearing supported the defendants' version of events, that Billy's arm could not have been positioned holding his coats open by the lapels or raised in the air, as witnesses loyal to the Cowboys testified. Goodfellow’s testimony was helpful in exonerating the Earps and the judge ruled that the lawmen had acted in self-defense.

Goodfellow treated Virgil Earp again two months later, on December 28, 1881, after he was ambushed. At about 11:30 PM that night, three men hid in an unfinished building across Allen Street from the Cosmopolitan Hotel where the Earps were staying for mutual support and protection. They shot Virgil as he walked from the Oriental Saloon to his room, hitting him in the back and left arm with three loads of double-barreled buckshot from about 60 feet (18 m). Goodfellow advised Virgil that the arm ought to be amputated, but Virgil refused. Goodfellow operated on Virgil in the Cosmopolitan Hotel using the medical tools he had in his bag, and asked George Parsons and another fellow to fetch some supplies from the hospital. Virgil had a longitudinal fracture of the humerus and elbow that could not be repaired, requiring Goodfellow to remove more than 3 inches (76 mm) of shattered humerus bone from Virgil's left arm, leaving him permanently crippled.

The next victim of the feud between the Cowboys and the Earps was Morgan Earp. At 10:50 PM on March 18, 1882, Morgan was playing a round of billiards at the Campbell & Hatch Billiard Parlor against owner Bob Hatch. Dan Tipton, Sherman McMaster, and Wyatt Earp watched, having also received death threats that same day. An unknown assailant shot Morgan through a glass-windowed, locked door that opened onto a dark alley between Allen and Fremont Streets. Morgan was struck in the back on the left of his spine and the bullet exited the front of his body near his gall bladder before lodging in the thigh of mining foreman George A.B. Berry. Morgan was mortally wounded and could not stand even with assistance. They laid him on a nearby lounge where he died within the hour. Drs. Matthews, Millar, and Goodfellow all examined Morgan. Even Goodfellow, recognized in the United States as the nation's leading expert at treating abdominal gunshot wounds, concluded that Morgan's wounds were fatal.

As County Coroner, Goodfellow conducted Morgan Earp's autopsy. He found the bullet "entering the body just to the left of the spinal column in the region of the left kidney emerging on the right side of the body in the region of the gall bladder. It certainly injured the great vessels of the body causing hemorrhage which undoubtedly causes death. It also injured the spinal column. It passed through the left kidney and also through the loin.” Berry recovered from his wound.

 

AUTHORITY IN GUN SHOT WOUNDS.

 

Goodfellow is today remembered for having pioneered the practical use of sterile techniques in treating gunshot wounds by washing the patient's wound and his hands with lye soap or whisky. He simultaneously became America's leading authority on gunshot wounds and was widely recognized for his skill as a surgeon.

On July 2, 1881, President James Garfield was shot by assassin Charles J. Guiteau. One bullet was thought later to have possibly lodged near his liver but could not be found. Standard medical practice at the time called for physicians to insert their unsterilized fingers into the wound to probe and locate the path of the bullet. Neither the germ theory nor Dr. Joseph Lister's technique for "antisepsis surgery" using dilute carbolic acid, which had been first demonstrated in 1865, much less surgically opening abdominal cavities to repair gunshot wounds, had yet been accepted as standard practice by prevailing medical authorities. Sixteen doctors attended to Garfield and most probed the wound with their fingers or dirty instruments. Historians agree that massive infection was a significant factor in President Garfield's death two months later.

On July 4, two days after the President was shot, a miner outside Tombstone was shot in the abdomen with a.32-caliber Colt revolver. Goodfellow was able to treat the man nine days later, on July 13, 1881, when he performed the first laparotomy to treat a bullet wound. Goodfellow noted that the abdomen showed symptoms of a serious infection, including distension from gas, tumefaction, redness and tenderness. The man's intestines were covered with a large amount of "purulent stinking lymph." The patient's small and large intestine were perforated by six holes, wounds very similar to President Garfield's injury. Goodfellow followed Lister's recommended procedure for sterilizing everything: his hands, instruments, sponges, and the area around the wound. He successfully repaired the miner's wounds and the miner, unlike the President, survived. A laparotomy is still the standard procedure for treating abdominal gunshot wounds today.

Goodfellow often traveled many hours to treat cowboy miles from Tombstone and performed surgery under primitive conditions. He traveled to Bisbee, 30 miles (48 km) from Tombstone, in January 1889 to treat a patient struck in the abdomen by a bullet from a.44 Colt. At midnight, he operated on the patient stretched out on a billiards table. Goodfellow removed a.45-caliber bullet, washed out the cavity with two gallons of hot water, folded the intestines back into position, stitched the wound closed with silk thread, and ordered the patient to take to a hard bed for recovery. He wrote about the operation: "I was entirely alone having no skilled assistant of any sort, therefore was compelled to depend for aid upon willing friends who were present—these consisting mostly of hard-handed miners just from their work on account of the fight. The anesthetic was administered by a barber, lamps held, hot water brought and other assistance rendered by others." The man lived for 18 hours after surgery, long enough to write out his will, but died of shock.