A strong tradition of rural general practice exists in the United States. Given the remoteness of the areas where solo practitioners often worked, the need for doctors to use everything they knew was considerable. Especially for a newly minted M.D., critical skills included improvising and using every available resource.

Even in the middle of the twentieth century, many rural doctors in the United States had offices in their homes and routinely made house calls. The typical image that comes to mind is a romantic one of male practitioners—tireless, heroic figures crisscrossing their territories at all hours of the day or night. Numerous memoirs by doctors burnish this image. All too little attention is paid to how the work of the practice actually got done.

Downplaying what these doctors knew or could do, many have assumed domestically based rural medicine lacked a "scientific" foundation (compared to urban, hospital medicine). Generally omitted from the nostalgic picture is how country practitioners incorporated science into their practices despite their rural locations. Also typically glossed over is the extent to which such doctors could not have managed without direct assistance from their spouses. Properly mined archival records present a rather different model of knowledge-making and knowledge-use in rural medicine.

This paper seeks to complicate the standard narrative account of the growing dependence on scientific break-throughs in major medical centers during this period by demonstrating that knowledge production also transpired in rural settings. Though the science used and produced by rural general practitioners (GPs) was unimpressive by modern academic standards, lab work and the use of emerging technologies were crucial to a good country practice. Further, gendered notions of who was using the science need to be challenged. Many a GP's wife, even when neither a nurse nor scientifically trained, learned to be a laboratory technician and to run both diagnostic and treatment equipment.

The analysis in this paper is based on a unique archive of letters and other papers that detail the career of one GP in rural New England and illustrate how his wife, with no background in science, mastered the tasks essential to helping ground her husband's practice scientifically. Letters written by the doctor and by his wife to family and friends offer evidence that claims on science by the academy and by city doctors omit much of the story.