Fifty Years a Country Doctor

by Hull Cook

Overview

In a world of HMOs, insurance companies, and an endless flood of forms, Hull Cook reminds us that there was a time when a visit to the doctor’s office cost three dollars and doctors still made house calls. Cook recounts fifty years of service as a rural doctor in Texas and Nebraska, where a wide spectrum of dilemmas tested his resourcefulness, endurance, and sense of humor. He describes helping to deliver a baby via telephone during the Blizzard of ’49, and he explains his “special delivery” of medication in the dead of winter—an operation involving his Beechcraft Bonanza airplane and a parachute jerry-rigged from dental floss and a red handkerchief. Cook saw it all, from cow-manure poultices to snakebite to kerosene poisoning to drug addiction. His humorous account of life in the first half of the twentieth century conveys a distinct sense of the slings and arrows of doctoring on the plains.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803264816
Publisher:	Bison Original
Publication date:	01/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	203
File size:	642 KB

About the Author

Hull Cook (1911-2001) lived in Sidney, Nebraska, for several years before moving to Bellingham, Washington.

Editorial Reviews

Lively tales from the rural medical beat, Texas to Nebraska, from the 1940s on. Cook delivers one rollicking anecdote after another illustarting what it was like to be a physician in the heartland before the age of high-tech medicine and litigation. Itþs a nonstop barrage of follies and close calls, of multiple pathological conditions and forays into the use of unregulated drugs, frequent visits to squalid shacks and dugout homesteads, rattlesnake bites and black widow bites and, worst of all, human bites. From his internship days in San Antonio to his practice in Sidney, Neb., Cook contends with superstition (one impatient husband wanted to spark his pregnant wife's contractions by tossing a flaming hornets' nest into her bed), delivers babies over the phone during blizzards, gets kicked in the head while administering enemas. The writing is conversational in tone, laced with old-fashioned humor (he named his medical school cadaver Ernest because he and his partner would be "working in dead earnest"). There are times when he seems to take pleasure in his patients' rustic, artless behavior (one sad woman explains that her cousin took an overdose of obituaries), yet he appreciates that he often was the court of last resort. "When is the best time for jumping off a train?þ he asks. þWait till it slows or stops, of course. But suppose it's accelerating all the time, faster, faster, and you have to get off. Then what?" What happens is that Cook improvises; he may not always act according to the rules of order, but he'll make no apology if the patient benefits from his ministrations. For the lucky backwater communities that have a Dr. Cookþdedicated, amiable,pressing on without food or sleepþthe sick have recourse. Most readers will only marvel at such a gift.

Kirkus Reviews