The Great nineteenth-century French physician Laennec advised the doctor, "Listen! Listen to your patient! He is giving you the diagnosis." Throughout his more than fifty years of practicing medicine in the Appalachians, Dr. W. Baynard Barton, the author of this book, has heeded Laennec's words. With compassionate, attentive listening, with kindness and understanding, Dr.Barton has aided his patients' emotional and mental health as well as their physical problems. In the early days of his practice, as frequently the only doctor in a remote and rugged area, he performed all types of medicine-from delivering babies to delicate eye surgery, to treating the maiming accidents of the coal mines and the logging camps. What made his work even more difficult was the fact that he had only his own intelligence and ability to depend on; there were few other doctors or sophisticated hospital equipment to help him in earlier years. To read this book is to step back in American history to a time when the doctor-patient relationship was a close and very human one.