Our Historic Country Doctor
His clinic still stands in Balsam Grove, NC
One of the first things I did when I moved to Louisiana in 1972 was to take out library books about the history of New Orleans. We lived in Slidell, just across the 24-mile Pontchartrain Bridge, the longest bridge in the United States. I think it was Belva Plain’s Crescent City that introduced me to the drama of New Orleans’ past. As a visitor to that city, with the gardens hiding behind walls and big wooden doors along the streets, I felt history in the air.
Then in the 1990’s I arrived in Brevard, and in between looking for work I looked for books about people who settled the county and what had happened here. You might enjoy an hour in your own library’s Local History Room.
I was completely enchanted by Mountain Doctor by LeGette Blythe.
Dr. Gaine Cannon’s medical building still exists in Balsam Grove, NC. A friend tells me it’s intact but is no longer in use. He began building the clinic in 1953, when he asked his patients to start bringing two stones to each doctor visit, and many brought more than two.
Early on, Dr. Cannon decided to name his clinic The Albert Schweitzer Memorial Hospital, after the famous doctor who at that time was working at his own clinic at Lambaréné, Africa. So Cannon wrote to to him for approval. Schweitzer replied in part:
Dear Doctor Cannon, I cannot but contemplate the picture on which you are occupied with a heap of stones, because, since my return to Lambaréné in the end of 1954, I did the same … and this means a constant trouble to have stones enough. … I appreciate the honor and sympathy you bestow upon me.
So the new clinic in Balsam Grove, North Carolina, began. Over the ten years it took to finish it, Dr. Cannon estimated that residents donated over 40,000 hours of labor.
He himself was generous, often giving sleepless nights and his own money for medicines to patients who paid in him in food or with whatever they had, such as two old television sets from a repairman.
Why would a man in business not aim to come out on top? Cannon said,
The fact is that I give medicine to a poor fellow or some old woman or an ailing child that helps the patient … is for me payment enough. … If it’s not needed, don’t do it; if it is needed, do it and forget about repayment. It’ll usually come back to you in one way or another. Do it because there’s a need for it.
Because areas of the mountains were still isolated earlier in the 20th century, traditional ways of speech and superstitions survived into Cannon’s time there. He earned his patients’ trust by respecting their beliefs, while at the same time educating them about their health.
Once a girl came to him in need of treatment for her sister’s poison ivy. When he realized she thought that she had given the rash to her sister by merely pointing to the ivy. “I should’ve knowed better, Doctor,” she confessed. Cannon gave her the salve and said, “It might be a good idea hereafter to try not to point at it or get near it when you happen to see a patch of poison ivy or poison oak.”
Dr. Cannon was grateful for the good roads in the 1950’s that had reached even the mountains, bringing TV’s (not always for the best, he said), good school buses, rural electrification and penicillin, “and even a newly built satellite tracking station”. But the roads led him to places that were still hard to get to and hard for his patients to drive out of, in bad weather.
He describes driving to treat patients in their homes in snow storms, and carrying them to the Brevard hospital in his Jeep with snow chains on the tires. Not all patients could get to his clinic when they needed to, so he went to them, no matter the time of year nor the hour of day or night.
So I wonder, who was the nurse I met in the bookstore that day? I found this picture, below, in Mountain Doctor, but I don’t recognize the name of either woman.
My friend who lives in Balsam Grove remembers another nurse from Dr. Cannon’s Clinic who is no longer living, Peggy Cowart. I’ve read about Peggy in this book, where she and others tell lots of colorful stories about their experiences caring for mountain people of all kinds and temperaments - “caring for” in more than just the medical sense.
So I think Peggy might be the one, but I may never know. I remember she was modest as she acknowledged to me her work for Dr. Cannon.
My copy of Mountain Doctor was withdrawn from the Brevard College Library and placed on their free-book cart when I was working there. Today when I opened this book I discovered Gaine Cannon had autographed it on April 2, 1964. He died in 1966.
He had inscribed this book with the English translation of Dr. Schweitzer’s phrase, “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben”, or “Reverence for Life”.
I’m dismayed by whomever thoughtlessly stamped WITHDRAWN over this beautiful inscription, and upside down, too. But if Dr. Cannon were to see it, I think he would just repeat Dr. Schweitzer’s phrase, and keep right on going.
I grew up in Transylvania County and remember visiting his clinic. My mother’s business partner dated Dr. Cannon for a while. I remember meeting him when I was a child. Everyone loved and respected him. I also knew his nurse, Helen McCall. I don’t know what made me think of him today. My mother used to have a copy of “Mountain Doctor”, but no idea what became of it. I was so excited to find it offered for sale on Amazon. I remember him telling stories of mountain people who had never been out of the mountains to attend school, or even take a trip to the small town of Brevard.
I really enjoyed your article so much. I’m going to order his book tonight and pass it on to my son and grandchildren.
Beautiful and inspiring article. Thanks so much!