In 1956, when Ben Dlin joined the faculty of psychiatry at UBC, he says he was the first qualified psychoanalyst west of Toronto and east of Japan. But the bulk of Country Doctor (Caitlin $18.95) concerns Dlin's medical practices in Alberta in the early '50s.

Born and raised as a Jew in the rural Alberta farm community of Bruderheim, Dlin wanted to be a doctor since the age of nine. His frank and sophisticated account of his patients' ailments and fears, including their sexual problems, concludes with his views on the medical system.

"The healing profession is now part of a business with the doctor at the bottom of the corporate/government food chain,"; Dlin says. "[But] much like the canaries that are first to show the effects of mine gases, patients are the first to suffer from the toxic effect of the health care system."; 0-920576-85-0

[Mark Forsythe / BCBW 2001]