John Walter Vincent Cordice, Jr. (June 16, 1919 – December 29, 2013) was an American doctor and surgeon who is most notable for operating on Martin Luther King Jr. to save his life after a 1958 assassination attempt.
Cordice was born on June 16, 1919[1][2]inDurham, North Carolina.[3] He moved to New York in order to study at NYU for undergrad and New York University School of Medicine.[3] His father, also a doctor,[4] practiced at Lincoln Hospital in North Carolina.[5] The elder Cordice was born in St. Vincent, West Indies and died in 1958.[6]
Cordice joined the Army in 1943[7] and served as the official physician for the Tuskegee Airmen.[4] While in the Army, he spent a year in France, where he assisted in that country's first open heart surgery.[4] Cordice worked at Harlem Hospital for forty years,[3][8] rising to the position of chief of thoracic surgery.
On September 20, 1958,[9] Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked with a paper knifebyIzola Curry. Cordice, along with doctors Aubre Maynard,[10] Farrow Allen and Emil Naclerio, were called in to operate.[3][11] Cordice mapped out a strategy which successfully saved King's life.[2] He was the subject of the book When Harlem Nearly Killed King: The 1958 Stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King, by Hugh Pearson.[12]
Cordice resided in Harlem and later Queens.[13] On December 29, 2013, he died of natural causes at the age of 95, in Iowa.[10][14][13]
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Died Sunday
