G.P. 1950

The new doctor in the Massachusetts town of Canton was a young man of 29 with a brand-new wife, a brand-new medical degree, a friendly face, and not much more to recommend him. His first patient was the town treasurer, down with a nasty cold. Dr. Dean Sherwood Luce studied the case carefully, administered treatment and presented his bill--75-c-;.

"I always paid 50-c-," grumped the town treasurer. Young Dr. Luce, the son of a Yankee sea captain who knew shoal waters when he saw them, swallowed hard and adjusted his rate.

That was in 1905. Since then, Dr. Luce* has treated more colds and other ailments in Canton than he or anybody else can remember. The babies he has delivered run into thousands. Many of them have come back to him to be delivered of their own babies, and several of the second generation have come back to be delivered of the third. The modest fees that Dr. Luce has often failed to collect lie recorded and forgotten in musty ledgers. "The minute young interns start thinking about the money they're going to get in their profession," Dr. Luce now says, "that minute they start to be failures."

Dr. Luce always had more urgent things to think about: one night in 1908, for instance, at a time when confinements, complete with delivery, grossed him $8 apiece, he traveled by streetcar through a blizzard to help a young mother give birth to triplets. All were forceps deliveries. Midway through the business the young father, who was helping out as anesthetist, fainted dead away. Dr. Luce left him on the floor and carried on alone. A year later he was going sleepless to make 40 calls a day by foot and by buggy in an effort to halt a milk-borne epidemic that felled almost a fifth of his town.

Today, when 74-year-old Dr. Luce is not actually treating patients, he serves as school doctor, trustee of the local library, and member of the local board of health. In his spare time, he attends postgraduate courses and pursues a favorite hobby--writing for the district medical paper which he edited last year. Between times he follows research on diabetes, from which he himself has suffered since he served as a captain in World War I.

Because his 45 years of service to his community is typical rather than unique, the American Medical Association convening in Cleveland last week gave Canton's Dr. Dean Sherwood Luce a gold medal and named him "Family Doctor of the Year."

*No kin to Henry R. Luce, editor in chief of TIME, LIFE & FORTUNE.

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