It could be I have reached the age of second childhood, and if so, please forgive me for writing bedtime stories. When the prescription from the doctor reads "take it easy", that means the patient has a lot of time to think, and, at this writing, I am thinking of other times when I have been under doctor’s care. All my childhood aches were taken care of by Dr. D.C. Wilson. He always sat on a chair by the bed. Felt my pulse and asked me to stick out my tongue. K.C. of home pulled the bee stinger out of my leg and that goes back to the third grade. I couldn’t write about doctors without a silent prayer for Dr. George Hunter, remembered as a war veteran’s best friend.

Ironton should be proud of the Medical Society now serving the city- a wonderful group of devoted professional people with room for more. Dr. D.C. Vidt has just retired and a couple others are sincerely in need of rest.

On this Thanksgiving Day the city can be thankful of the A.M.A. Several of my doctor friends have M.D. on their automobile license tag, and Dr. Ann Martin Alsott has her initials "AMA" on her plates, which also stands for American Medical Association.

Dr. Ann’s father, Dr. W.F. Marting, tells of enlisting in the Army at the time of the Spanish-American War while he was in medical school in 1898. "So you want to be an M.D." said the master sergeant, "Well, that you are, you’ll be a Mule Driver of an ambulance," and that makes the senior Marting an M.D. since 1898.

He opened his medicine case filled with glass tubes full of powder and rolled the powder in little papers like a homemade cigarette and the taste was awful when mother mixed the powder in a teaspoon of water.

Dr. Wilson built the home at Sixth and Adams, now the home of Dr. Newton Spears and family. After he moved to California, Dr. Nat K. Moxley drove his white horse and buggy when he called at our home. He started giving sugarcoated pills.

The morning I couldn’t get out of bed without help Dr. Cos Burton came on a run. Taking part in a "Womanless Wedding" staged as a benefit at the high school auditorium for the Christ Episcopal Church, with 6 foot 4 inch, Ed Culbertson, president of First National Bank dressed as the bride and the 5 foot 4 inch former postmaster Wobby Davis, as the groom, I caught cold in the back wearing Mrs. C’s evening gown, and spent a week in bed with the misery. When my long time friend Dr. Chester A. Casey gave me a shot in the arm in 1920 to help me get my breath, he stayed an hour to talk about Shorty Davies, Bill Brooks, Diner Barron and the Tanks. That was the time Hugh Daugherty of the Hotel Marting stopped in to see how I was and, in his Irish witty way, said, "You have a nice room to be sick in."

Scores of names of doctors flash in memory as this is typed. The first that comes to mind is Dr. J.M. White who had an office on Second Street across from E.J. Merrill Drug and last lived at Fifth and Center, now the post office location. Before I was six he invited me in his office for a stick of chewing gum and he opened a door to scare me with the life-size skeleton in the closet.