J. B. Wofford, M.D.

Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN: 0-914875-32-9
$25.00

Post-World War II changes in the medical world are chronicled through the experiences of both doctors and patients, from coal-mining towns in Kentucky to sophisticated Southern urban medical centers.

Neither a medical text nor a social treatise, The Witch Doctor’s Dance provides an inside look at medicine. As he and his patients contend with medical and social situations with humor and insight, they often prove Dr. Wofford’s theory that healing is a spiritual dance which joins knowledge and hope.

J. B. Wofford, M.D.

J. Benjamin Wofford grew up in the rural South during the Great Depression of the 1930s and served in the navy in the Pacific Theater during World War II. After the war, he went to college on the G.I. Bill and then to the University of Tennessee School of Medicine at Memphis with part-time jobs, loans, and scholarships. Old "City Hospital," where Dr. Wofford encountered the realities of patient care during medical school, is no more.

A third of Dr. Wofford’s professional career was spent as an emergency medicine specialist and the rest as a family practitioner. He retired in 1990, stayed home one week, then had to get back into the swing of things. He returned part-time to the emergency rooms of small outlying hospitals and a rural clinic in Catawba, North Carolina. When Dr. Wofford isn’t working, he’s likely to be flying his Cessna 172.

The Witch Doctor’s Dance was Ben Wofford’s first full-length book. He has also published The Marine: A Guadalcanal Survivor’s Final Battle and Uncle Henry’s Ghost.

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