Borderline Medicine: A Country Doctor's Extraordinary Cases

By Ronald K Francis

In the border country, the law had long arms. But a dying man has none.
When Dr. Arnold Francis arrived in rural British Columbia in the 1920s, he brought a medical degree and little else. What the textbooks never taught him was that a country doctor's true territory had nothing to do with boundaries on a map. Over fifty years of practice-through Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the upheaval of war-he stitched up bootleggers and delivered babies, vaccinated children in Doukhobor villages and treated the sick in Japanese internment camps. He pulled an open safety pin from an infant's throat with forceps and steady hands, and he sailed his boat through kelp beds to reach a mother labouring alone on an island reservation.
Based on the true stories of Dr. Arnold Francis, Borderline Medicine is a memoir of moral grey areas and quiet heroism-of a man who never turned away a patient, never asked what a man had done before treating what was wrong with him, and carried his black bag into places where the rules did not quite apply. It is a portrait of rural medicine at its most human, and of a community that depended on one doctor to be everything the world beyond the mountains could not.
A true story of compassion, courage, and the borderline between right and necessary.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1069941336
• ISBN13: 9781069941336
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Ronald K Francis
• Length: 346 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"