Dr. Dabney Minor

On the way home from Asheville this past Wednesday, I stopped at the Cracker Barrel in Hickory for some comfort food . . . the same meal I always get when I visit a Cracker Barrel (which isn't very often) . . . chicken-fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, fried okra, corn and biscuits.

(In my defense, I don't dine at CB very often, and I had not eaten all day.)

Quite by accident, I was seated at a table gracing a wall with a medical theme. And bolted to the wall, under a dingy/sticky/cheap frame, was an honest-to-God original medical license issued in 1910 by the State Board of Tennessee Medical Examiners. 

It belonged to a 22 year-old graduate of Vanderbilt University named Dabney Minor.  He graduated from medical school on May 2nd, and was endowed with his medical license on May 25th.

I had to laugh at the fine print at the bottom of the license . . .

" . . . will become VOID if Licensee becomes an advertising or travelling doctor."

Just goes to show how times - and medical ethics - have changed.  Oftentimes, I think, not for the better. 

And it makes you wonder.  What exactly was a travelling doctor to do? 

As I savored my biscuits (yum), I wondered, if poor Dabney ever fancied that his hard-won medical license would be discarded in a yard sale and wind up hanging on the wall of a chain-restaurant?

Of course, a lot of things that I-never-could-have-imagined-in-a-million-years-at-Bowman-Gray have happened to me during my magical mystery tour through small-town medicine in North Carolina . . . including being discarded by my hometown hospital (that would be Randlph Hospital in Asheboro, North Carolina) as "a dime a dozen" Pediatrician by the greedy/power-mongering/medically clueless likes of Bob Morrison and Steven Eblin . . . for the horrible. awful, unpardonable sin of putting a very sick baby before their ugly threats.

Heavy sigh.

Author's note:  Still working on that post I promised last week.  It's a kind of character study in "right people".  Might not have it up until the weekend.