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Fifty Years a Country Doctor
Copyright © 1998
by Hull Cook
U of Nebraska P
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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. — from the
jacket
Dr. Cook's book is a real find. ... A delight to read. — Noel Perrin
Amusing, moving, vivid, and compelling. This book gives the reader a
portion of history that should be preserved. — William Kloefkorn
Lively tales from the rural medical beat . . . Cook delivers one
rollicking anecdote after another illustrating what it was like before the
age of high-tech medicine and litigation. It's a nonstop barrage of
follies and close calls. . . . For the lucky backwater communities that
have a Dr. Cook — dedicated, amiable, pressing on without food or
sleep — the sick have recourse. Most readers will only marvel at such
a gift. — Kirkus Reviews
The 200 or so pages of 50 Years A Country Doctor by Hull Cook take
the reader through some hair-raising experiences, as well as entertain
with some delightful accounts of those years between 1929 and the second
World War, and into the '70s when the medical practice began to change
radically. — Ponca City News
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography
