""The Shootist." You'll remember it as the story of an aging gunfighter, fighting TB and living out his last days. When I first saw it about the time it came out (1976, I think), I had the impression the Duke was playing himself, considering his own health at the time."

Yeah, he died of lung cancer in 1979, I think. BTW, a small thing, but in the movie what he had was cancer, not TB. I can hear James Stewart, as the doctor, telling him he had "a cancer". J.J. Books, Wayne's character, took laudanum for the pain. Ron Howard played a local boy who admired Books, and saved his life, for a moment, when he killed the bartender about to shoot a wounded Books in the back. Then he in a fit of political corrctness more valid now than then, threw Books' six shooter across the barroom. In those times, he would have kept it as a valuable souvenir.

It was the very real Doctor(dentist) john H. Holliday who had TB. He died in a sanatorium in Glenwood Springs, Colorado in 1887. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Holliday Stan