Yankee Doctor in the Bible Belt

Welcome to Dry Lick ...




Welcome to Dry Lick, Kentucky!|
In a simple, rural region of Kentucky, a little town surrounded by a patchwork of small farms, horses, and tobacco, a woman medical doctor arrives. A population of a few thousand awaits her. A stranger in a strange land, she must quickly learn the odd dialect and humorous ways of the locals, master outdated equipment, and do her best to mend, treat, and heal the men, women, and children who quickly find their way to the doorway of the Medical Clinic.


The town Dr. Janet Tamaren practiced in consisted of a main street with a courthouse. Her medical practice shared a building with a video rental store. Town amenities included two restaurants and a hardware store. Plus, the corner cemetery.


Kentucky has an intuitive mistrust of outsiders-like people from New York City, a location which was described in the local paper as the devil's playground.

Yankee Doctor in the Bible Belt is Dr. Tamaren's humorous memoir based on her real life experiences working as a physician in rural Kentucky. Her story in a witty and heartwarming collection, bringing a new lens to small town rural America ... often amusing; sometimes terrifying; and sometimes heartbreaking. Her patients taught her valuable lessons about the nature of life, death, and the role of a doctor in mediating between the two. Quickly learning to translate the local dialect, she gets to know the families in town and learns a lot from her patients.
Within its pages, discover the ties that bind us to each other in this thing called humanity. Dry Lick became the fictional name for the town and boasted generations of families, many living next door to each other. It even had its own dialect-English is spoken with an accent and with idioms unlike anywhere else in the country. It was a culture unto itself.

These stories will transport you to a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, for good or for ill. Plus, they offer a window into the intricacies of medical diagnosis and the adventure of solving medical puzzles.

Janet Tamaren, MD found herself at 38, entering medical school, answering the siren call to the mysteries of medicine.
For 25 years, she worked as a family doctor-20 of them a small rural community in Kentucky where she ran her own health clinic.