Canal Town

Book excerpt: A classic historical novel of a young doctor and the Erie Canal, which brought with it to Western New York not only progress and prosperity but unforeseen upheavals. “[An] elaborate, colorful, and affectionate portrait of a canal town in its growing pains. Obviously [Samuel Hopkins] Adams has not only gone back to the sources but has lived with them for a long time before writing his account of a young doctor setting up his practice.”—The Atlantic “Mr. Adams knows his Erie lore so well and has boned up so thoroughly on American medical history in the early part of the [eighteenth] century that nobody who reads the book can fail to learn a great deal about what life was like in general and the practice of medicine in particular was like in a boom town.”—The New Yorker “His villains are strongly delineated and actuated by very human motives, his minor figures are picturesque and drawn with gusto, even his sympathetic characters come alive with personal crochets and idiosyncrasies.”—Carl Carmer, Saturday Review of Literature