The Panacea Doctor
The mysterious disappearance of a beloved physician
by
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A man and a boy were winding up a productive morning fishing off the pure, soft sands of Alligator Point's secluded beach. The bucket of sea water was filled with the fish they landed: redfish, speckled trout, and grouper. It was an unseasonably hot April day and the blaring sun was starting to bake the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle. The boy's attention was caught by a large, dark mass far down on the beach, and he tugged the man's T-shirt. "Look, Pa," he said excitedly pointing to the blob. "Ain't nuthin' but a beached whale," the man said shrugging his shoulder. "Don't bay funny, Pa. There ain't no whales in the Gulf." "There sure is them. Sperm whale, blue whale, humpbacks." As the man started to pick up the fishing gear, the rods and reels, tackle box, bait, and the bucket of catches, the boy ran off towards the object. From far away he shouted back, hands cupped around his mouth. "Pa, Pa, this ain't no whale!" When the man got there, he saw a hideously bloated and decomposed body of a man, face-down into the sand. He told his son to run off with all the gear, put everything in the truck and stay there. The grotesque face of the corpse was unrecognizable. Aside from a shredded shirt, he had no clothes on and his mud-covered and massively swollen body was covered with deep lacerations, abrasions, and all kinds of other wounds. His sloughing skin was darkly discolored and wrinkled. A yellowish-brown waxy material coated large patches of his skin. One hand was jaggedly amputated. And the stench emanating from the drowned corpse indicated that putrefaction had begun. The man ran back to his truck and drove the boy home quickly. Then he drove off to the Wakulla County Sheriff's Office in Crawfordville, up north about 25 miles towards Tallahassee on US-98, to report what he had found. The sheriff's assistant knew right away that something important must have happened because the face of the man looking at him was frozen in a state of horror. And he knew whose body it was. The year was 1964.
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About the Book
In this historical thriller, a German doctor’s brilliance earns him an exceptional reputation in his new rural Florida community—until his dark background begins to unravel, culminating in his disappearance.
About the Author
Andrew I. Schafer is an academic physician, educator, and scientist. He is the author of the historical novel, Unclean Hands, that tells the story of the nineteenth-century discovery of the importance of handwashing by physicians, well before the discovery of bacteria.