Doc Holliday Was Credited With 16 Killings. At Most, He Killed Three.

The legend credits Doc Holliday with sixteen killings. Historians who have gone looking for the bodies put it between one and three. He qualified as a dentist on 1 March 1872 — Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, Philadelphia, at the age of twenty. In the summer of 1873 he developed a cough with blood in it, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and was told he had roughly six months if he stayed in Atlanta. That October, he and his partner John A. Seegar entered three exhibits at the Dallas County Fair and took first place in all three. His last known advertisement ran in the Dodge City Times on 28 June 1878. It ended: "Where satisfaction is not given money will be refunded." He died fourteen years after that six-month prognosis — thirty-six years old, fifty-seven days in bed, of the same disease that had killed his mother when he was fifteen. The last gunfight of his life was over a five-dollar debt he could not pay. This is the record, not the legend.