The Gunfighter’s Surgeon

How an 1877 Wooster Medical Graduate Made a Name for Himself in the Wild, Wild West

by Cecilia Rasmussen

Dr. Goodfellow Throughout a medical career that spanned more than three decades, Dr. George Emery Goodfellow – an 1877 graduate of Wooster’s medical school – achieved legendary status for his care of outlaws and lawmen in Tombstone, Arizona. He is the first physician known to operate successfully on abdominal gunshot wounds and was praised as the first to perform a successful "perineal prostatectomy" in 1891.

Goodfellow’s colorful history includes his dismissal from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis for fighting (he was the school’s boxing champion). Soon after, he entered the University of Wooster.

In 1880, the young doctor hung his shingle over the legendary Crystal Palace Saloon in Tombstone. The town of 2,000 residents already had twelve doctors, but only Goodfellow and three others sported diplomas. Over the next eleven years, his association with the likes of Wyatt Earp and his four brothers, Doc Holliday, and a host of others put money in Goodfellow’s pocket and earned him the nickname the "gunfighter’s surgeon."

After the infamous 1881 shootout at OK Corral, Goodfellow helped to perform the autopsies on Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers. It was Goodfellow who pronounced Morgan Earp’s wound fatal after Earp was shot in the back while playing pool with his brother Wyatt. When Virgil Earp was later ambushed and his left arm almost blown off, Goodfellow removed four inches of shattered bone, saving the useless arm. With his good arm, Virgil could still handle a gun and later served as marshal in Colton.

Goodfellow early on observed that abdominal wounds from the Colt .44 or .45 were invariably fatal: "Gunfighters’ maxim is ‘shoot for the guts,’ knowing that death is certain, yet sufficiently lingering and agonizing to afford a plenary sense of gratification to the victor in the contest."

In his notes on the "Impenetrability of Silk," he watched two gamblers, Luke Short and Charlie Storms, in a gunfight in 1881, just a few feet from where he stood. Short blasted Storms through the heart. Upon examining Storms, Goodfellow noted that the gambler’s folded silk pocket handkerchief was stuffed into this chest wound. Goodfellow pulled out the handkerchief and out came the bullet, which had killed Storms when it penetrated the heart.

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