Dr. J.G. Brown of Woodville who practiced in a

Dr. J.G. Brown of Woodville who practiced in a wide area of the county for a span of almost fifty years is remembered by patients, neighbors and friends.

Folks who needed his services - and these ranged from Woodville all the way down to Madison and up into the mountains in between - remembered him as a conscientious, very modem doctor for his day. Stories abound of him saving lives and limbs - sometimes with only the most primitive of tools and conditions.

What was the life of a rural doctor like in the days before cars, before antibiotics, before pharmacists. According to Harold Brown, Dr. Brown’s son, now 84 and living in Winchester, the life of a country doctor was one of the most grueling imaginable.

“He never wanted any of his children to be doctors,” Mr. Brown said. “He thought it was just too hard a life.” “But he was able to educate us all for some other profession. Not from his practice - fully half of his accounts were never paid - but from the two farms we managed in a Woodville area.”

From the farms, and from the farms and gardens of his patients, Dr. Brown prescribed preventive medicine, unusual for tum-ofthe-century diets. “He’d tell them to eat creasy (cress) and cabbage,” Mr. Brown recalled. “He taught his patients to make sauerkraut, preserving some of those vitamins through the long winter months, when many country people didn’t see anything fresh.”

Dr. Brown also encouraged his patients to eat less meat, less salt and less fat.

In 1918, when the flu broke out, Dr. Brown had “a thunder of a time,” according to his son. He treated patients with “migraine” tablets,” Brown said “This was something like aspirin.” He also used mustard plasters.

He was just a really good pneumonia doctor. I don’t remember him losing any patients to the flu.”

“Henry Wood was right across the road,” Brown continued. “He had pneumonia so bad that we could hear him breathing at our house.