Coming to Texas

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.