Coming to Texas

About the Book

A young Scottish doctor looks back on the unforgettable characters who became his patients in East Texas. Qualified as a doctor only 18 months before, he leaves the security of his medical school, his hospital and his heritage to start a single-handed rural practice in the wilds of Texas—his only resources: his ex-flight attendant, pregnant wife and their year-old baby. They exchanged their city sophistication for a rustic life, their temperate climate for the appalling heat and humidity of Texas, and their culture and language for a behavior and speech based on one of America's last frontiers. Deceived by those who invited them to American and left briefly penniless; befriended by a nearby village without medical help and miles from a hospital, they cared for their new patients, covering, in an old Ford with a hole in the floor, a house-call area larger than New Hampshire and Rhode Island combined. Like their patients, they survived. Because they had each other.

About the Author

Eric Anderson has written three books on aviation and more than 1900 articles in the medical or popular press. British-trained, he got his baptism as a physician in rural practice in East Texas in the early 1960's. Memories of his most unforgettable patients form the basis for this book.