It is always a pleasure to read about lovable descriptions of country life and heartwarming stories on the synergy between humans and animals; and the numerous memoirs by animal lovers like James Herriot and Gerald Durrell can easily be considered as some of the best examples within this genre. And with ‘Fields and Pastures New’ by veterinarian John McCormack, I have discovered another author who can equally delight the reader with his warm descriptions of rural life.
Fields and Pastures New presents the reader with the story of how McCormack, a total stranger and outsider to the Choctaw County, in Alabama, gains the respect as a veterinary doctor and acceptance as a friendly neighbor, within the community through his acts of healing the sick animals and taking care of them with kindness and patience. With a Degree in ‘Doctor of Veterinary Medicine’ and a few months of experience as an assistant to other vets under his belt, John McCormack along with his wife and 2 young kids moves to ‘Butler’, Choctaw County in 1963, looking for a bright beginning for his career as a veterinarian. And the community there, who never had a licensed veterinary practitioner among them, receives him with much enthusiasm.
With in a few minutes of landing at Butler, we see McCormack meeting with his first patient, a 4 week old puppy who was suffering from an acute case of hookworms, and performing surgery and blood transfusion even before getting settled into his new home. McCormack succeeds in launching his career on a positive note by saving the life of his first patient and what a career it is; we will meet stories of success, stories of joy, stories that can inspire, stories of frustrations & failure and even stories that will make you sad while traveling along with McCormack as he takes the reader through fascinating narrations of his medical encounters with animals, experiences with their owners and share pictorial descriptions of the rural surroundings. Initially the villagers treat him as an outsider but a string of successful medical cases soon finds him and his family a special place with in the community.
McCormack also brings the ever-present prospect of getting called away for duty from personal moments of life even at ungodly hours that is part of the professional life of doctors and vets in great focus with in the book.
“Here I am, out on a cold Christmas Eve trying to do the impossible. No light, a dog that’s got to have a leg removed, my spouse and children waiting in the car. A typical McCormack mess…”
This description from an incident were he gets called away for performing an amputation on a dog with gangrene while he was leaving with his family on a Christmas Eve to visit his wife’s folks is a great example to this unpredictability that is part of a doctor’s career.
Like life, within these narrations we can find every form of emotion –happiness, disappointments, sadness over loss and new hopes – that one can imagine. Readers who are familiar with James Herriot’s works will find some elements of similarity between Herriot’s memoirs and McCormack’s book, but they differ greatly in the atmosphere that they exude, as they are both set in entirely different geographic and cultural settings; and McCormack presents his family and their involvement in his medical adventures with the animals in more elaborate detail. Like Herriot, McCormack also infuses a sense of lightness into his narration through humor and also presents some of the best descriptions of the special bond between animals and their owners within his narrative.
‘Fields and Pastures New’, which describes the initial days of McCormack’s veterinary career, is a delightful reading material for those who love animals and nature.
Cover Photo: Photo by Annie Theby (Unsplash)
