The Search for Christian Doppler

Abstract

A glance at my watch told me it was three o’clock. Another night almost completely taken up with work on this series of lectures. The first one — the really important one — was only a few short weeks away. Important for me because it was my first as visiting professor at a major American university, the prestigious Health Sciences Center of the University of Texas at Dallas — and in the Department of Neurosurgery. It was here in 1963 that the dying President John F. Kennedy was brought in a last vain attempt to save his life. It was here that my host professor and Chairman of the Department, Dr. Kemp Clark, then a young resident later to become President of the World Federation of Neurosurgery, told Jacqueline Kennedy that her husband — the most powerful man in the world — was dead (62).