PEP, PILLS AND POLITICS
by Arthur W.Hopkins, M.D., D. C. '99, D.M.C. '03, Vermont Printing Co. 1944, 239 pp, $2.50.
In these days, every physician, when he approaches the years of retirement, apparently wants to write a book and many of them do. Such productions have a real appeal to the public, morbidly if not ghoulishly interested in their own insides. But the work of Dr. Hopkins differs from others of its type in that it is the story of a rural practitioner, in a small New Hampshire town, doing the untamed but highly useful tasks which such professional men find it their lifework to do.
He tells the story of his youth in Vermont as a member of a not too well endowed family, of his difficult but successful efforts to make both ends meet in the Dartmouth of earlier days, of his progress in medical school and as hospital intern, of his final settlement, at first burdened with a load of debt, in the small town of West Swanzey, N. H., where the remainder of his life, up to date, has been spent. Then follows the story of his activities there: of maladies and injuries which he, remote from help, must solve independently and which stretch his ingenuity to the full; of hopeless cases that recover and easy cases that die; of patients heroic and of patients quite the reverse; of patients that pay and patients that do not; of professional colleagues, most of them competent and honest, but some less so; of strange cases and routine cases; of his horses, his automobiles, his houses; of his family, including the daughter who followed his footsteps in the profession; of his rare vacations; of Denman Thompson, the nationally famed member of the community, and of "Two Twarts," whose fame was merely local. And he tells also of opportunities for public service, as moderator, member of the school board, and representative, and of the progress which came as the result of those efforts..
As an example o£ good writing the book has its defects; in places it may even be esteemed by the supercritical as a bit naive. But Dr. Hopkins is writing the story as he would chattingly tell it, without the encumbering embarrassments of the rules of the books. His career, modest as it is, has been one of high utility and great interest. That interest is well reflected in this story of his life.
CAPTAIN GENE MARKEY 'lB USNR was recently appointed Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, after three years' foreign duty which included Panama, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, the Middle East, India, China and Ceylon. He served with a British destroyer squadron in the Mediterranean during the Sicily Cam- paign, and with the Allied Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean during the attack on Java.
