Frederic Andrews Gibbs and the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Abstract

Frederic Gibbs, the peerless expert on electroencephalogrphy was summoned to provide opinion on the EEG tracing of Jack Ruby, who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the American President, in 1963. Gibbs pleaded that the tracing suggested features indicative of psychomotor epilepsy and Ruby killed Oswald in a state of fugue. His view was not agreed upon but Gibbs stood his ground unflinchingly. Subsequent appeals to the higher court spared Ruby from imminent execution and finally he died a natural death from metastatic complications of carcinoma of the lung in 1967.