Steele, Volney

Volney Steele was born in a small town in northwest Arkansas in 1922, the son of the town doctor. Volney's early introduction to medicine came at age 12 when hereceived a provisional driver's license to chauffeur his father, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, to house calls in a Model T. Volney enrolled in the Navy V-1 program and earned his degree in medicine in 1945 from the University of Arkansas. Volney retired from medicine in 1986 after practicing for more than forty years. Always a student of History, in the early 1990s, Volney began publishing historical articles and wrote his first book, a biography about Wellington Rankin. A few years later, he published Bleed, Blister and Purge, a survey of medical history.