Dr. Charles R. Baxter, one of the doctors who tried to save President John F. Kennedy after he was shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, died Thursday of pneumonia at a Dallas hospital. He was 75.

Baxter was a 34-year-old assistant professor of the Dallas Medical School and director of the emergency room at Parkland Memorial Hospital when Kennedy was brought to the hospital.

Baxter and his colleagues tried to stabilize Kennedy, working to stop the bleeding and make it possible for him to breathe.

“As soon as we realized we had nothing medical to do, we all backed off from the man with a reverence that one has for one’s president,” Baxter said in 1988. “And we did not continue to be doctors from that point on. We became citizens again, and there were probably more tears shed in that room than in the surrounding hundred miles.”

Baxter then performed surgery on Texas Governor John Connally, who was seriously wounded in the assassination. Born in Paris, Texas, Baxter earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in 1950.

He earned a medical degree from what is now the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in 1954.

Baxter developed a formula for burn patients, referred to variously as the Baxter Burn Formula or the Parkland Burn Formula. He discovered that patients with large, severe burns need tremendous amounts of the fluid the first day of treatment, especially during the first eight hours of their ordeal.

Baxter also founded a tissue bank at Parkland hospital to provide skin grafts for burn patients.

“Despite the fact that he did a lot of research … he was in the wards all the time face-to-face with patients,” said Dr. Robert Rege, professor and chairman of surgery at UT Southwestern. “He was the old triple threat,” the person who teaches, does research, and patient care “and does it all well.”