12.27.15   Texas doctor relates bedside stories from his career

Dr. Tom Hutton was no doubt a top-notch doctor during his more than thirty years of practicing in West Texas and Minnesota. He is also a very gifted writer and storyteller, as he demonstrates in his memoir, Carrying the Black Bag: A Neurologist’s Bedside Tales (Texas Tech University Press, $27.95 hardcover).

Hutton is a past president of the Texas Neurological Society and taught at the Texas Tech School of Medicine before retiring in 2001 and moving to his ranch near Fredericksburg.

His stories show compassion, insight, and humor as he deals with real-life patients facing life-and-death challenges.

Hutton grabs the reader’s attention right off with “Of Middle Linebackers and Medicine,” telling how he got into medicine. As a scrawny sophomore on the Richardson High School football team, Hutton collided with the team’s star middle linebacker and suffered a broken thumb. It ended his fledgling football career but resulted in him deciding to be a doctor.

The family doctor who set his thumb offered to let Hutton follow him into the exam rooms for several weeks as he treated patients at his clinic. Three examples from those visits — including a humorous encounter with a breast augmentation patient — illustrate how a sensitive doctor uses various skills and approaches in treating people. “I experienced the excitement and affirmation that goes with practicing medicine,” Hutton writes. And he passes that excitement along in his stories.

One piece concerns research he did into Adolph Hitler’s medical problems — “Did Hitler’s Parkinson’s Disease Affect the Outcome of World War II?” The short answer is yes, but the whole story makes interesting reading.

Waggoner Ranch: Weatherford photographer Jeremy Enlow says his book, Cowboys of the Waggoner Ranch, is a “100 percent Texas book — produced by Texans, about Texans, for Texans.” It was even printed in Texas.

The elegant, full-color, 140-page oversized book (11 inches by 12) features Enlow’s captivating photos, with informative text by Fort Worth writer Jan Nichols Batts. The book focuses on the day-to-day life of the twenty-six cowboys who continue to work cattle on the Waggoner, even as the massive 510,572 acre ranch is on the market and its future is unresolved.

“This book,” the authors note in the introduction, “is a glimpse into the lives of cowboys who ride the trails of their forebears, living a life and practicing skills that have almost disappeared.” The book sells for $58, and the first printing (November) sold out in ten days. A second printing came out earlier this month.

To get more information, view some of the photographs, or order the book, go to waggonercowboys.com.

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Glenn Dromgoole is co-author, with Carlton Stowers, of 101 Essential Texas Books Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.