"Beautiful, humorous, and lucidly written, A Country Doctor's Casebook is a heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking treasure of American rural medical history. For those who may have become disenchanted about the craft of medicine, here the enchantment returns." Pierre Delattre, author of Woman on the Cross, Episodes, and Tales of a Dalai Lama "This pioneer physician's account of medicine, life, and death in the north of northern Minnesota is suffused by humanitarian warmth and humor. We all are there: Native Americans and immigrants, our lives beset by accidents and illness, and above all the love and dedication making us who we are, helped by our own Galen. A great read."Robert Treuer, author of The Tree Farm: Replanting a Life "A Country Doctor's Casebook is a delight--wonderfully written with a wry sense of humor. These stories ring true: compassionate, gentle, loving portraits of people for whom Dr. MacDonald cared deeply."David Hilfiker, md, author of Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at His Work and Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor?s Journey with the Poor

MacDonald takes readers on another round of house calls, office visits, and emergency summons in this charming collection of vignettes--some hopeful, some heartbreaking--that offer a unique look at a bygone era of 20th-century rural America.

A humane and humorous collection of stories chronicling the work of a country doctor practicing in the remote north woods.

House calls. Flu epidemics. Terminal illnesses. Coroner duties. Fishhook incidents. For more than three decades, Roger A. MacDonald served the people of Minnesota's north woods as a family practitioner and jack-of-all-trades, even responding to the occasional "barn call" for ailing animals. In this new collection of stories, MacDonald takes readers on another round of house calls, office visits, and emergency summons. His remote practice saw patients of every age and type, from a local child with a penchant for putting things up his nose to a dedicated church pianist with untreatable cancer, from a teenager with unexplained seizures to a vacationing Mafioso recovering from a heart attack. MacDonald offers tales of patients, colleagues, and neighbors, probing their very human responses to medical dilemmas and sharing humorous and touching episodes in equal portions. A Country Doctor's Chronicle is a charming collection of vignettes--some hopeful, some heartbreaking--that offer a unique look at a bygone era of twentieth-century rural America.

Originally published in Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan magazine (May 1935), COUNTRY DOCTOR is A. J. Cronin's affectionate look at young Finlay Hyslop, a newly qualified Scottish doctor who assists a seasoned country GP in managing a variety of medical crises.

In this quietly revolutionary work of social observation and medical philosophy, Booker Prize-winning writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr train their gaze on an English country doctor and find a universal man--one who has taken it upon himself to recognize his patient's humanity when illness and the fear of death have made them unrecognizable to themselves. In the impoverished rural community in which he works, John Sassall tend the maimed, the dying, and the lonely. He is not only the dispenser of cures but the repository of memories. And as Berger and Mohr follow Sassall about his rounds, they produce a book whose careful detail broadens into a meditation on the value we assign a human life. First published thirty years ago, A Fortunate Man remains moving and deeply relevant--no other book has offered such a close and passionate investigation of the roles doctors play in their society. "In contemporary letters John Berger seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience." --Susan Sontag

A humorous, anecdotal history of the author's medical practice from 1936 to 1988, it describes a simpler time, during which doctors practiced without many of the problems that face modern physicians: forms to complete for every procedure, overcrowded offices, second opinions, high insurance costs, etc. In fact, much of the book is about the unique doctor-patient relationships that existed before the age of health insurance. It was a different kind of time, when the family doctor often met his patient at the emergency room and remained the sole treating physician throughout the hospital stay.