concern was for his wife, urging Cortelyou, "My wife – be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her – oh, be careful." The initial crowd reaction had been panic, and an attempt to flee the hall, which was frustrated by others surging inwards to see what had occurred. As McKinley was carried out on a stretcher to an electric-powered ambulance, there was a moan from the crowd at the sight of the President's ashen face. Foster rode with him on the way to the fair's hospital. On the way there, McKinley felt in his clothing and came out with a metal object. "I believe that is a bullet." McKinley had been shot twice; one bullet had deflected off a button and only grazed him; the other had penetrated his abdomen. Operation The ambulance carrying McKinley reached the Exposition hospital at 4:25 p.m. Although it usually dealt only with the minor medical issues of fairgoers, the hospital did have an operating theatre. At the time of the shooting, no fully qualified doctor was at the hospital, only nurses and interns. The best surgeon in the city, and the Exposition's medical director, Dr. Roswell Park, was in Niagara Falls, performing a delicate neck operation. When interrupted during the procedure on September 6 to be told he was needed in Buffalo, he responded that he could not leave, even for the President of the United States. He was then told who had been shot. Park, two weeks later, would save the life of a woman who suffered injuries almost identical to McKinley's. The first physician to arrive at the hospital was Dr. Herman Mynter, whom the President had met briefly the previous day; the wounded McKinley (who had a good memory for faces) joked that when he had met Mynter, he had not expected to need his professional services. As McKinley lay on the operating table, he stated of Czolgosz, "He didn't know, poor fellow, what he was doing. He couldn't have known." With Park unavailable and with the fading afternoon light the major source of illumination in the operating room, upon the arrival of another surgeon, Dr. Matthew D. Mann, the decision was made to operate at once to try to remove the remaining bullet. Mynter had given McKinley an injection of morphine and strychnine to ease his pain; Mann (a noted gynecologist without experience in abdominal wounds) administered ether to sedate McKinley