50 Years a Country Doctor

By Hull Cook

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803263899
• ISBN13: 9780803263895
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 203 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Hilarious

I wasn't looking for humor per se when I got this. I thought this might be a little glimpse into years gone by and some shrewd cowboy psychology or something - and to some extent, it is that as well. I found myself laughing a lot at some of the stories, despite Cooks attempt to handle some of the topics with "discretion". Great look at a different time and a different mentality. Can't think of a doctor I wouldn't recommend it to - they might learn something!