Roland Sharp Country Doctor -- Memories of a Life Well Lived

Roland Sharp, Country Doctor is the fascinating life story of a 100-year-old physician who has remained true to his ideals of service throughout a 75-year-career as one-room schoolteacher, family doctor, and medical educator. Dr. Sharp practiced for seventeen years as a coal company doctor in West Virginia, serving mining families and delivering more than 1,500 babies--often in a cabin up a hollow and once, with forceps, in the dark! At age fifty-five he returned to his home county of Pocahontas and worked as a rural GP until his was nintey-three. During many of those years he was deeply involved in medical education, serving as the founding president of the West Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine and setting that school on a course that emphasizes the holistic and compassionate approach to rural medicine that characterized his own practice.