Doc Holliday

John Henry Holliday, known as Doc Holliday, was an American dentist from Georgia who is remembered far more as a gambler and gunfighter of the Old West. Born in 1851, he took a degree in dentistry from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery at about the age of twenty and opened a practice in Griffin, Georgia. He was soon diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother, and he moved to the drier climate of the American Southwest in the hope of easing his symptoms. There he turned to gambling, then a recognised trade in Arizona, and formed a lasting friendship with the lawman Wyatt Earp. He took part in the events around the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone in 1881 and rode with Earp in the posse that followed. Modern researchers conclude that his tally of killings was between one and three, far below the legend. He spent his last years in Colorado and died of tuberculosis in 1887 at the age of thirty-six, a trained dentist whose disease shaped his whole life.