A Great Heart

About the Book

Survival was their dearest hope...these mountain people. Their children were their greatest asset...but they died one by one, long before they reached the age of six, many times at birth along with their mother. When a mother died in childbirth the family was usually broken into tiny pieces...but Mary Breckenridge changed all that with her midwives and nurses. They rode their horses in the middle of the night, in the coldest of winter, to save a mother and her child...but they did more than that...they treated gunshot wounds, snake bites, gave shots, but most of all they gave hope to this mountain community where few had cared until this great woman came into their midst. Mary Breckenridge had vowed never to love again, but she fell in love with these mountain people and served them well...with the courage of Job, she began to live again...a different life, but a full one, and she took an entire mountain of people with her on this journey, along with her nurses and midwives. This is the story that might have been her own.

About the Author

Shirley Noe Swiesz is the author of two books: Coal Dust and Mountain Stranger. She is the co-author of four other books: Old Buttermilk and Green Onions, Old Stories of Berkeley County, Book One and Two and Snake Oil, Superstars, and Me, Ole Doc Tommy Scott. Swiesz lives in Southeastern Kentucky, in a renovated church, where she does a popular weekly column, Quilt Pieces, for a local newspaper.