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In The Big-Little World of Doc Pritham, readers are treated to a rousing tale of the life of an intrepid country doctor. Frederick John Pritham of Greenville Junction, Maine, is a practitioner firmly ensconced in the northwoods of his home state. The dust jacket tells how the doctor
has traveled thousands of miles through the Maine wilderness on horseback and on foot; ridden cars, boats, planes, buggies, snowmobiles, lumber trucks, trains, and railroad handcars; gone on skates and snowshoes; jumped trains; swum rivers; waded through mud and snow and slush; skated over thin ice; plunged his car to the bottom of Moosehead [Lake] – all to provide medical service to an area of some five thousand square miles.
It's small wonder that he pronounced ‘getting there and back was the biggest obstacle to my medical practice’.
This chapter explores the intersections of region and place in the medical life-writing by and about Dr Fred Pritham, who, by the late twentieth century, became very well-known in the rural and remote communities and towns of the Maine's northern counties. At the heart of his local celebrity is a biography, cited above, written by well-known Maine author Dorothy Clarke Wilson and published in 1971 when she was at the height of her career. Within the genre of physician auto/biography, ‘country doctor tales’ comprise a small but distinct body of literature.
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