Doc

Doc is an engaging memoir by Ron Losee, a Yale Medical School graduate who, in 1949, headed west with his wife, Olive, and their two-year-old daughter to find a place to settle down in and practice medicine. The 400 townspeople of Ennis, Montana needed a doctor, and Ronald E. Losee, M.D., became "Doc."Losee's patients are a broad panoply of characters. Townspeople, cattle ranchers and migrant workers, miners and fly fishermen, new mothers and old folks - each, in his or her own way, preserving an American way of life that is rapidly vanishing. With them, Losee learns from his failures and rejoices in his triumphs. He stays up all night before each delivery, worrying through every possibility of disaster; performs appendectomies on a rickety operating-room table; repairs fractured tibiae; and even amputates a leg with a common hacksaw.Eventually, his yearning for knowledge propels him into a two-year stint at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal for an orthopedic residency. He returns to Montana a specialist, and so begins the orthopedic work that gains him, in his middle years, international recognition as a pioneer and important contributor to the understanding of the "trick" knee, and developer of an early operative procedure to remedy this, the "Losee Operation."His voice is all his own - real, earthy, outspoken and robust. Ron Losee has written a moving account of his doctoring years, evoking the feel of small-town life, the pioneering spirit of the West, the myriad moral dilemmas a rural doctor faces, and the courage and commitment that are the heart of his way of medicine. (6 1/4 X 9 1/4, 236 pages, b&w photos)