eBooks by Joseph R. Miller M.D.
Pipe Tobacco and Wool by Dr. Joe Miller (joe@wf.net)
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Our minds are conditioned to look to New York or Boston or Washington D.C. for insightful thought and cogent writing. But now and then a voice is heard above the tumult of the cities.Doctor Miller lives and writes in Wichita Falls, Texas. He speaks to who we are and who we’d like to be. He asks that we look inside ourselves and see the things we’ve tried to hide. He asks us to think, and love, and sometimes only laugh.After more than twenty years of practice, disability forced Doctor Miller away from Obstetrics and Gynecology. He turned his mind to writing. The results have been published in diverse sources, but most have been seen on the editorial or opinion pages of the Wichita Falls Record News or Wichita Falls Medicine Magazine.When we read the words he writes, we are reminded that concern and caring and love for one another are universal traits. We are reminded that who we are is in partly who we’ve been. We’re reminded that who we’ll be is determined in part by who we are today. We’re asked to love each other. We’re asked to be tolerant when love’s too great a stretch. We’re asked to see children as themselves not just extensions of their parents. We’re asked to laugh and sing and dance with joy at the wonder of it all. |
Pathogen by Joseph Miller, M.D.(joe@wf.net)
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Pathogen begins as a medical investigation into an unreported toxin that is causing death among children. A Pathologist gathers case studies and tries to correlate the data in an attempt to find a vector: mice, berries, mosquitoes, etc. that could be infecting a disparity of children over different parts of the Country. One adult female has died the same distinctive death. Her husband, a retired police detective, joins the doctor. Slowly, using computer models to solidify their data, their ideas shift from what to whom, until they become sure that a man is indeed the vector.The early chapters are years apart, with incidents of this new deadly syndrome often unrecognized and poorly reported. The later chapters are compressed in time, as the retired detective, motivated by revenge, and the FBI, race each other to a conclusion. The detective is forced to decide if revenge is enough motivation to continue a child’s endangerment.
The scenes of hospital practice, medical conferences, and residency are as accurate as my memory will allow, many taken from personal experience during my own residency and the private practice of medicine. The short references to combat come from my own experience as well. Joseph R. Miller, M.D. |
Bubba’s Rules for Country Living by Joseph R. Miller, M.D.(joe@wf.net)
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Bubba’s Rules for Country Living comes from my own experience at the country Store at Lake Kickapoo in Northern Archer County in North Texas. I moved to a small place at the Lake when disability forced me away from medical practice. A wonderful life awaited me. I was born in Ohio and raised all over the Midwest, but had the lasting good fortune to move to Texas and to marry South. My mother acted Yankee nearly all her life, even when she lived with us at Kickapoo, but my father countered her harshness with a Welsh sense of humor that fit in no matter where he was or who was listening. His stories had a cadence to them, a rhythm that rivaled what I heard at Kickapoo. Listening to him when I was a child, I learned that art as well. Not like my father; never that grand. But I could tell a story, and I could listen without interrupting or looking away or letting my attention wander. And those wonderful men at the store at Kickapoo accepted me. They invited me to sit at the table labeled Stammtisch, and “allowed as how,” if there happened to be a pause that signaled the end of a story, and I could jump in fast enough, I “might could” tell a story of my own. Just “might could,” mind you. Nothing was certain at the table labeled Stammtisch at the store at Kickapoo, except Bubba’s rules for living. |
The Other Side Jordan by Joseph R. Miller, M.D.(joe@wf.net)
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In the 1930’s, H.L. Mencken said of the people who fled the dust bowl, “They are simply, by God’s inscrutable will, inferior men, and inferior they will remain until by a stupendous miracle, He gives them equality among his angels.” This is the story of one such “inferior” man. We first meet Jared as a child, walking away from the Kansas Dustbowl with his mother. We watch him grow in Tucumcari, New Mexico. When his mother dies, he is adopted by a physician who raises Jared there.Along the difficult road to adulthood, he meets an old Civil War veteran, who tells him long tales of Mr. Lincoln’s Army and instills in the boy a sense of duty and honor. This is a Novel about the power of relationships: Jared’s father, his mother, the doctor, the Civil War veteran, and the effects of these relationships on a boy who grows to manhood influenced by them all. The Paris Hair Salon and Barber Shop by Joseph R. Miller, M.D. |
The Paris Hair Salon and Barber Shop by Joseph R. Miller, M.D.(joe@wf.net)
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The men and women of Tucker, Texas are split on the need for new library, which the women want, or a gymnasium and weight room for the high school’s sporting teams, which all the men support. Ms Maybelle, the owner of the Paris Salon, takes a page from Lysistrata, though she wouldn’t know Aristophanes if he jumped up and bit her on the butt, and suggests that the ladies of the town withhold their sexual favors unless the men change and vote a library. Well, if you want to start a woman’s movement, start it in a hair salon. The idea jumps from the starting block like Jesse Owens with a firecracker up his—well, you get the idea. Soon the town is not only divided on what they think they need, but cranky as all get out from lack of sexual comfort. How this conflict is resolved is the theme of: THE PARIS HAIR SALON AND BARBER SHOP |