Up to My Armpits: Adventures of a West Texas Veterinarian by Dr. Charles Edwards

ISBN 0-9657985-6-9 Hardback
     Retail: $37.95  Page Count: 349,  Size: 9.0" x 6.0"
ISBN 0-9657985-7-7 Trade Paper
     Retail: $19.95  Page Count: 349,  Size: 9.0" x 6.0"

EVER THOUGHT of a veterinarian’s workaday world as a 9-to-5 job in a cozy clinic, with nights free and weekends spent golfing? Not in the cow country of far West Texas, not in the experience of Doc Edwards, whose far-flung practice was based at his home and adjacent animal hospital in Marfa, in the Big Bend Country.

His 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week practice lasted for the better part of fifty years. During certain seasons of the year he would work virtually non-stop, sleeping only while his wife drove him on to the next ranch. He was literally up to his armpits in work: pregnancy-testing cows, delivering calves, or extracting a deer horn or mesquite limb from deep in a cow’s throat.

Doc’s practice also included horses, an animal he truly loves; hogs, not his favorite creature; sheep and goats; and family pets, including dogs, cats, goats, skunks and turtles. He refused to treat rattlesnakes.

Doc has been stepped on, kicked, run over, stomped, gored, scratched and bitten by his patients. His was a vocation spent mostly in dust, dirt, and manure.

Doc’s writing flows in the voice of a true storyteller. Here is the life of a man who loved his work and practiced it with compassion and dedication. In these stories, mostly autobiographical, his strong feelings for the country and the people are evident. He loves the grasslands, desert, and mountains of rugged Trans-Pecos Texas. His clients were his friends. He particularly enjoyed the camaraderie of ranchers and cowboys and appreciated a well-run cow work.

For anyone interested in the ranching and cowboying tradition of the Southwest, Doc Edwards’ book offers a fresh perspective, the cow-doctor’s point of view, and it is told with humor and the energy of an indomitable spirit.

DR. CHARLIE EDWARDS was born near Sanderson, Texas, and has spent his life in the Texas-Mexican borderlands area of West Texas along the Rio Grande River, leaving only to attend college and to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. He graduated from Texas A&M in 1949 with a degree in veterinary medicine, and began his practice that year in Marfa, Texas, in the heart of the Big Bend and Davis Mountains area. His work continued for more than fifty years, and ranged from the Pecos River to the Rio Grande and north as far as New Mexico. Charlie is now retired and lives with his wife, JoAnn, in the same Marfa home they have shared since 1953.

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