I imagine my father looked in on him three

I imagine my father looked in on him three or four times a day.”

Brown remembers that C.E. Johnson’s brother died in an army camp and that Dick Miller was severely sick and almost died at Camp Lee.

The doctor, always accustomed to interrupted sleep, had several periods with no sleep at all. “I remember well my father going for 48 hours without ever taking off his clothes,” Brown said.

Besides the influenza epidemic, delivering babies accounted for many of Dr. Brown’s midnight calls. “My father had a saying,” Mr. Brown said. “He’d say that the reason that babies were bom at night was because most of them were conceived at night.”

Late night callers would wake up young Harold Brown, asking him to rouse his father. Meanwhile, Harold would get the doctor’s horse and bring it to the front door.

Late one Saturday night, two men came around with a friend who had been badly beaten and left for dead in a drunken brawl. Without giving their names they deposited their friend and galloped off. The doctor found that the man was near death from a stab wound in the heart. After giving him emergency first aid, the doctor went with him by carriage to Culpeper, then by train to Charlottesville. The dying man was over seven hours getting to a hospital, but he survived.

Dr. Brown was known for the survival rate of his patients. In terms of rural medicine of the day, he was better - schooled than most. He had attended the University of Pennsylvania, the only school besides Harvard requiring three years of study for a medical degree. He boarded and roomed with a Quaker family, studying year-round with one month of apprenticeship to a doctor each year.

James Gideon Brown graduated second in his class and his diploma was signed by Dr. Howard Kelly and William Osier - two of the founders of Johns Hopkins University.

Although they requested