Fifty Years a Country Doctor

Hull Cook

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780803263895
• eBook ISBN: 9780803264816
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Nineteen
• Twenty
• Twenty-one
• Twenty-two
• Twenty-three
• Twenty-four
• Twenty-five
• Twenty-six
• Twenty-seven
• Twenty-eight
• Twenty-nine
• Thirty
• Thirty-one
• Thirty-two
• Thirty-three
• Thirty-four
• Thirty-five
• Thirty-six
• Thirty-seven
• Thirty-eight
• Thirty-nine
• Forty
• Forty-one
• Forty-two
• Forty-three
• Forty-four