Many thanks to Chip Deyerle for his review of my book, Full Moon Saturday Night that he did on Amazon. I had just read Chip's book, Last Train From Cleveland,  and I am equally impressed. His account of not only the travails of steam railroading in the 1920's but the state of medical science back then really comes home to me. I remember the trains back then, the Dixie Flyer racing down the tracks on the west side of Highway 41 into Evansville, Indiana when I was a kid, an what a spectacle it was! Those trains were the 747's of today. It was all steam back then and all very exciting. What we take for granted now about medical care is also a huge contrast to what was available back then; not much more than three hundred years prior. Anesthesia was the one big advance, but dying during surgery from anesthesia complications was certainly not unusual. Chip's book brought all that back to me. Back at IU in the late 50's, heart surgery was new and it was so scarey to see up close people go into surgery knowing that many would not come out alive, then having to watch the almost unbearable tragic effects on the families when their loved ones actually did die in surgery. That was and is the way ER work is and always will be, the hum-drum routines mixed up with the awful unexpected disasters that strike so suddenly. We interns were the EMT's back then and at the time I felt like I had found out more about life on those Marion County Hospital ambulances in my first week of that duty than I had in all time before. There were no interstates then and on those horrible gunshot, car wreck, and heart attack runs they had to bust up trains to let us through. Later, when I did over ten years of ER work, I stood it for about as long as anybody could and I am glad it is behind me. Now, there are few railroad tracks to deal with and the lights change to green in the big cities to let the first responders through, huge advances since I was growing up.  In Chip's book, Last Train From Cleveland, BL Deyerle, a steam engineer, died from surgery for a goiter. It was a tragedy for even occurring at all, given most of them were from dietary lack of iodine. But to then die prematurely from a post op infection was even worse. A great read and I urge all of you to read it.