"As soon as the Hospital's staff realised that Bruce Lee, the superstar, struggled between life and death, they vanished very quickly for fear of being mixed in an embarrassing position if Bruce were to die. That pitiful tendency of fearing to be implicated in suspicious occurrencies was again recurrent in the day of his death."
Next follows the reporting of Bruce's activities in the "July 20, 1973" section and the circumstances under which he died on that fatal day of July 20, that I won't translate here because they had already been described in the first part of the article, published in 'Karate International' magazine.
The cause
The main question one asked was to know Bruce Lee had died. The main inquest pointed out the Equagesic pain killer that Lee had taken as the cause of death. When the three members of the jury produced their verdict, they declared that as far as they knew Lee had had an unusual allergic reaction to one of the three ingredients composing the pill, but that it was impossible to isolate it; the official verdict as it was released pronounced "death by misadventure", which meant that a chain of unconnected events took place by misfortune resulting in an accident.
Cannabis
The first who disagreed with the official verdict were Drs. Wu and Langford. According to them, Bruce Lee was allergic not to the equagesic but to the cannabis found in him.
Prior to the inquest, a preliminary hearing was held to gather all the medical parties who were to testify, and to discuss what they were going to say. Dr.R.Teare, a specialist in pathology at the University of London, was in charge of conducting the inquest. At the time of that preliminary hearing, his first concern was to clarify what each person was going to say, and to establish the way in which the inquest was going to evolve. Dr.Teare also declared that all of the doctors with proper credentials should have been trained outside of the colony and, as a medical community, they should be watchful about whatever would be said. When Drs. Wu and Langford sustained the cannabis' theory, Dr.Teare replied that it lacked any grounding as no document in the annals of medicin could back it up. That's the kind of reasoning that Dr.Langford deemed to be stupid, as the Equagesic, which Dr.Teare pointed out to be responsible, didn't have any complications in its records. It had been prescribed by the millions throughout Asia without any recorded complications, and thus it couldn't be accounted for Lee's first collapsing in May. Dr.Teare didn't take that objection under consideration, however, and insisted on the Equagesic hypothesis. Therefore, for lack of a verifiable argument supporting the cannabis poisoning thesis, the collapsing that Lee endured in May was considerably minimized at the time of the inquest.
The last page is up next,
Pedro