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Review by Clifton K. Meador
Dr. John McCormack is back with more wonderful stories about the animals and people of Choctaw County, Alabama. This is one of those books that you want to read in front of an open fire on a cold winter's night. There is a cozy, back-home feel to each of the stories as McCormack brings back to life the citizens of southwest Alabama.
In his first book, "Fields and Pastures New," McCormack introduced an odd self-taught local animal "doctor" who knows all the treatments of the mythical and nonexistent cow disease "hollow tail." McCormack wisely works with rather than against this man and gradually replaces the dogma and empirical practices with the principles of modern veterinary medicine. The small town of Butler came to life as we saw and hear its inhabitants accept the new young veterinarian and his wife and family, immediately and without judgment. We learned one horse, cow and pig disease after another. We saw the sheer physical stamina it takes to be a rural veterinarian. We saw him remove a five-day-old placenta from a cow mired up in a swamp while three drunk coon hunters tried in vain to help him. All ended up retching and gagging. McCormack was left alone waist deep in icy water and mud, immune to the stench of putrefaction.
In "A Friend of the Flock," we watch McCormack move deeper into the lives and animals of the people of Butler, the small town where he lives. He becomes a vital part of their world, vaccinates their dogs against rabies, tests their cows for brucellosis, and slowly teaches that there is an effective science to the treatment and care of man's animals. We learn the difference between a man's dogs and a man's hunting dogs. In the animal hierarchy of Choctaw County, hunting dogs sit at the top. We watch the construction of the model veterinary clinic that has been McCormack's life dream. We meet his wife, children and his own cats and dog. We see a man who by example, not overplayed nor overwritten, tells us what it is like to be the first and only scientifically trained veterinarian to arrive in a deeply removed section of rural Alabama.
If there is such a person as a qualified reviewer of stories from country veterinarians (a genre brought to us by James Herriot), it might be me. Especially as a reviewer of this book. John McCormack's stories are real, at least to the son of a veterinarian who grew up two counties removed from Choctaw County, Alabama and who had the pleasure of watching first hand the hunting dogs of Choctaw on more than one occasion.
Clifton K. Meador MD is the chief medical officer at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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