Old Dr. Foshee loved to bird hunt. He basically assumed the hunting rights in all the New Site area and wherever he could get in his Ford Model T or in his horse and buggy, which he used during the wet months when the unpaved roads were unpleasant to travel. His two tricolor setters, Penny and Nellie, always accompanied him in the buggy, knowing he was likely to stop on the way to a house call and hunt a roadside pea patch.

In the days before antibiotics, a doctor’s ability to alter the course of disease was greatly limited, but there were medicines for relieving pain and helping symptoms. Most importantly, in the dawning of modern medicine, the country doctor tried to keep people from making bad things worse with noxious home remedies and quackery.
One December morning, he…