1. Many people knew Madelyn Dunham at the time, and have recalled their experiences with her. When she became a grandmother, that would have been a memorable event.
2. Whites were already in the minority in Hawaii at the time, but blacks were nearly nonexistent, and a white woman and a black man in Hawaii having a baby in 1961 was totally out of the ordinary. It would be hard for the doctor and the nurses to forget that.
3. The daily, incessant media coverage of Bambi and his Hawaiian saga would have either jolted their actual memory, or caused them to have false memories -- the latter is one of the reasons why eyewitness testimony becomes more unreliable with time.
4. Obama was allegedly born about six months after JFK was inaugurated. Common event that occur contemporaneously with uncommon ones are recalled to a greater extent than ones that occur in a common and random time period.
I don't know anything about image analysis and defer to you and others on that subject. I do know something about this, and I can tell you that the chances of the doctor remembering this are very, very small.
Without subsequent interactions with the mother or baby, there is no way most doctors would recall such details about a particular delivery. As another physician posted earlier, he remembers memorable medical details from some deliveries, but not the patient. I delivered a limited number of babies, and remember no details about the mothers or babies aside from medical issues. (Like the 17yr old who said she had wasn't pregnant, appeared very fat, had abdominal pain and then delivered in the ER).
Your list of points doesn't work for the medical situtation-
#1 only works if the medical people involved in the delivery actually knew Madelyn Dunham. In a city the size of Honolulu, that's a small chance.
#2 This assumes that those delivering the baby knew the father was black (was he in the delivery room? That was not very common then) or could tell the baby was black, as opposed to some other mixed race child. I can tell you that I don't recall the racial make up of children I delivered, and with one exception, I don't recall the race of the mothers, either. The exception was someone who was supposed to be royalty in her native country, and what I remember was the listing: "princess of"...
#3Not necessarily, they would have to have the memory in the first place to be jolted. And medical people are now painfully aware of HIPAA and the cost of violations, so even if they remembered, they'd have good reason not to make it public.
#4 This definitely wouldn't work, and I'm a bit surprised you added it. The events are 6 months apart, which is huge in terms of associating the two events, and they are unrelated events which makes it even more tenuous. If it was the same day, maybe. At a conservative guess, an OBGYN, would have 50-100 deliveries in those six months.
Really? I haven't seen any stories or quotes from people who knew Madelyn Dunham in Hawaii in 1961. The closest, time-wise, are those from college grads in the mid or late '60's who went to work at Bank of Hawaii and were intimidated by her. The earliest mention I've seen of her and her grandchildren was by a bank employee who remembered Barry and his half-sister Maya stopping by the bank on the way home from Punahou School in the '70's.
Whites were already in the minority in Hawaii at the time, but blacks were nearly nonexistent, and a white woman and a black man in Hawaii having a baby in 1961 was totally out of the ordinary. It would be hard for the doctor and the nurses to forget that.
You really should read Frank Marshall Davis' (non-porno) autobiography, "Livin' the Blues." He waxed poetic about the lack of racial prejudice in Hawaii, and how mixed ancestry was a matter of pride on the islands -- with the exception of noticeable prejudice against haoles (whites), which really tickled his fancy. He was married to a white woman by the way, and had five bi-racial kids born in Hawaii before the Dunhams arrived.