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Informationen zum Autor Dr. Benjamin Gilmer is a family medicine physician in Fletcher, North Carolina. He is an Albert Schweitzer Fellow for Life and associate professor in the department of family medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill and at the Mountain Area Health Education Center. A former neurobiologist turned rural family practitioner, Dr. Gilmer has lectured across the country about medical ethics, rural health, and the intersection of medicine and criminal justice reform. He lives with his wife, Deirdre; their two children, Kai and Luya; and their dog, Prince Peanut Butter, in Asheville, North Carolina. Klappentext "Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2022."--Title page verso. Leseprobe Good Hope Road On June 28, 2004, in rural Appalachia, a man with my name and my profession strangled his father in the passenger seat of his Toyota Tacoma. The other Dr. Gilmer was a family medicine physician in North Carolina, at a small clinic he’d founded with his wife near the tiny town of Fletcher. He was recently divorced, living alone in a house on the hill above his office. In the weeks and months before that night, he’d been drinking more than usual, going out to bars during the week. He’d also been making some impulsive decisions—like buying the brand-new truck he was driving that night, even though he was massively in debt. After a full morning of seeing patients, Dr. Vince Gilmer left his practice on the afternoon of June 28 to drive to Broughton Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Morganton, North Carolina, where his father had lived for the previous two years. Vince’s father, Dalton, was sixty years old, a diagnosed schizophrenic, and had landed at Broughton after a time of delusional behavior, drug abuse, and intermittent homelessness. Now, though, he was being released. His son was getting him out. Dr. Vince Gilmer wasn’t particularly close to his father, but he had arranged for Dalton to be cared for at a facility called Flesher’s Fairview Health and Retirement Center, a five-minute drive from his house, so he could keep a closer eye on his care. Vince told his co-workers that he was going to take his father into the outdoors before taking him to his new home, that the two of them were going canoeing on Watauga Lake in Tennessee. It was a place Vince knew well. He had often escaped there to relax during his residency after medical school. If anyone thought it was strange for Vince to drive two hours in the wrong direction so that he could take his schizophrenic father on a quick evening boat outing, they didn’t mention it. This was the sort of thing he did often. Vince’s nurses and co-workers would not have been surprised that he thought a trip to the lake might be therapeutic. Dr. Vince Gilmer was well known for his unconventional, friendly, and personal approach to life and medicine. He was a big believer in the power of the outdoors, the sort of doctor who had been known to take depressive patients on walks to help them clear their minds rather than just give them medicine. Patients and nurses called him “Bear” because of his hulking presence and warm hugs. None of Vince’s co-workers knew how much his father had deteriorated while at Broughton. If any of them had, they would have realized how difficult canoeing would have been for him. Dalton Gilmer was a frail man, heavily medicated, barely able to stand on his own. He would have needed to be lifted into the boat and certainly could not swim. Still, along with the usual lawn care tools—garden shears, gloves, clippers—that Vince used to maintain the landscaping at his clinic, there was a poorly tied-down canoe rattling in the bed of the truck that afternoon, throughout the hour-long drive...
