A Country Doctor's Chronicle

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.