When Julie Hunter, heiress to the Hunter Estate that includes the parsonage, receives her first letter from the new minister, she throws it into the kitchen stove. But when he hunts her down at the Gander Inn where she is working and living, she realizes the handsome, green-eyed bachelor is a force to be reckoned with. When she moves to the little house behind the parsonage, wills clash and doors slam, but she can't resist the love she encounters or the God who gently guides her steps. (354pp. Masthof Press, 2018.)
The handsome heir, the runaway bride, and the abandoned waif all converge on Six Chimneys Abbey the same wild, stormy day. The heir comes for the reading of the will, the runaway bride as a companion to the sister of the deceased man, and the little waif? No one seems to know who she is or why she is there. But all three stay—first because of the storm that changes to a blizzard and finally because they all have a reason to stay. But when the abandoned groom discovers the location of his intended, drastic measures must be taken and the runaway bride must make a quick, frightening decision. (435pp. Masthof Press, 2019.)
Under the dripping trees at her mother's graveside, Amber McDurfee encounters the steady gaze of a blue-eyed veterinarian who recently moved into her Vermont village in the late 1800s. What follows is a sometimes stormy, but always intriguing relationship that leads Amber to a firmer trust in God and also in the vet. (388pp. Masthof Press, 2022.)
Marshall Hall was trained as a physician in the early nineteenth century, scientifically oriented, University of Edinburgh Medical School. The son of a Methodist cotton manufacturer and bleacher at Nottingham, Hall believed that in science lay the future for progress in medicine. Following early work on diagnosis, on women's disorders and on blood-letting, Hall came to specialise in the nervous system and in particular on the concept of reflex action. For Hall, who proposed a mechanistic explanation of reflex action, Galenic animal spirits and souls in decapitated creatures were out. A superb experimentalist, Hall strove to establish experimental medicine (physiology) as the basis of the medical curriculum instead of anatomy, the long standing domain of the surgeons. They were among the strongest critics of Hall's vivisection procedures, despite his efforts to establish a Code of Practice. Hall was involved in several controversies within and without the Royal Society where he was victimised by its Physiological Committee. He addressed a range of social and public health issues including the abolition of slavery, and devised a new method of resuscitation and a more sensitive physiological test for strychnine detection. He also proposed plans for improving and linking sewage disposal and the transport system of the metropolis.
