The Doctor of Dunstable Plains: When death invades life

The lamps threw black shadows on the wall as the men hurried down the creaky wooden stairs. Increase felt like he was descending the last steps into utter darkness. Surely death was already taking up residence.

“This way,” he said, trying to sound in control of the situation.

Jean followed him to the end of the room where the small apartments stood like prison cells in a dungeon. The door to the woman’s hovel opened and she stood there, silent and resigned. She moved aside for Increase, but stepped forward when she recognized Jean.

The practice of medicine seems so arbitrary. Some live, some die. Even when you do your best. In a moment of despair and grief, Dr. Increase Graves moved his small family to rural New Hampshire to doctor the mill workers of the Industrial Revolution. He finds himself healing more than bodies, though, when he discovers the town’s prejudices are causing disease of epidemic proportions.

Now he must push aside his own grief and pain to treat the citizens of Dunstable Plains. But when he meets Jean Giatros, an herbalist from the Old Country, he discovers there is more to death than just dying. And more to life than just living.

A story of learning to live in the midst of death.