Franklin County GaArchives News.....Royston's Fine Surgeon Fefused to Desert Home for City Practice May 17, 1946
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Alisa Dunn ardunn91@gmail.com December 8, 2022, 11:40 pm

The Hartwell Sun May 17, 1946
By Bill Boring; Constitution Staff Writer.

Royston, May 7--They tell the story here about the rich man who went to Atlanta 
for an operation, Money was no object with him, he said, "I want the best surgeon 
you can get."

"Well," he was told by the officials of the Atlanta hospital, "it will take about 
two hours to get him."
"That'll be all right," the rich man said, "I want the best surgeon money can 
hire."

Two hours later Dr. Stewart D. Brown walked into the hospital to perform the 
operation on his wealthy fellow townsman.

BEST MAN WITH KNIFE
That just about sums up what the people of this section think of Dr. Brown, the 
"best man with the knife," they say, "in all of the world."

Dr. Brown last week passed his 65th milestone in life and performed his 28,000th 
operation and the hospital records show that he has a lower mortality rate that 
the surgeons of Johns Hopkins and other famous hospitals of the country.

"If a man dieds when he comes into this hospital," says the Negro orderly at Dr. 
Brown's hospital here, "he was dead when they brought him in."

TEAMMATE OF COBB
This statement obviously is motivated by sentiment as well as respect but it is a 
well-known face among men of medicine, as well as the layman, that Dr. Brown is 
one of the nation's top-ranking surgeons.

Dr. Brown's whole life has been devoted to surgery; that is, all of it after he 
finally pulled away from baseball, his "love" of younger days.

Brown was a hometown teammate of Tyrus Raymond Cobb and even today the skilled 
surgeon worships Cobb with a boyhood enthusiasm. They started playing ball 
together back in 1904, when they joined the Augusta Club in the South Atlantic 
League. They got fired together and both went to the Tennessee-Alabama League. 
Brown left to join the semipro club in Vienna, he having decided that medicine was 
his life's work.

He applied for a job at the Vienna club and got a wire back offering him $100 to 
pitch four games--and win them. He snapped the offer up and, incidentally, 
collected the one hundred.

Passing through Macon, en route to Vienna, he stopped by to call on his old 
Augusta teammates, Augusta was playing a series there and they weren't doing so 
well.

"Know where I can get a hitter?" the manager asked Brown. "You fired the best 
ballplayer you ever had," Brown told him, "Ty Cobb."

"What's that Indian doing now?" the manager asked, "I knew I shouldn't have let 
him go."

So the manager wired Cobb a new offer and he snapped it up. Cobb went on to 
baseball immortality and Brown to success in medicine. And the two have remained 
warm friends ever since.  Cobb today has plans to help finance a hospital for Dr. 
Brown in Royston.

Dr. Brown graduated from the University of Georgia Medical College and interned in 
Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta and other large medical centers. When he landed back 
in Royston, in 1912, he was equipped with perhaps as much skill as any young 
surgeon ever started out with.

FIRST OPERATION
And he wasn't long in making use of it, either.  When he got off the train, he was 
met by a Royston doctor. The doctor told him that his childhood sweetheart was 
near death.

She had been diagnosed as pregnant, but Dr. Brown, after seeing her, diagnosed her 
ailment as an abdominal tumor and so he decided to operate.  They told him that he 
was wrong; that she was pregnant; that he was going to kill his old childhood 
sweetheart.

But Dr. Brown knew where he stood. He was confident the woman was not pregnant but 
suffering from an abdominal tumor. He went to the hardware store, bought a pan, 
and rounded up his equipment, In 30 minutes, he had performed the operation.  The 
woman is still living and since that time has undergone a second operation, 
performed by Dr. Brown.

From that day on, Dr. Brown kept busy. At the beginning he wanted to leave, to go 
to Atlanta, or one of the larger cities, to establish himself, but the people of 
this section wouldn't let him. He couldn't leave when there were no surgeons and 
such a great need for them.  So he stayed on and today this fact is his greatest 
satisfaction in life, he says.

HOSPIITAL PATIENT
Dr. Brown, in the early days, carried the hospital to the patient. His hospital 
was his car; his operating table, the kitchen table. He would hook flood lights to 
a battery in his car to create adequate light for an operation.

Dr. Brown, in those early days, would perform an average of 25 operations a week 
and travel 1,500 miles to do them. He believes he save more lives in country homes 
than he does now in his hospital, because in those days his cases were "eleventh-
hour" cases.

And today, he says, the patients diagnose their own ailments. Medical knowledge 
has so advanced, that a patient as often as not, informs the surgeon what's wrong 
with him. And usually he is right, Dr. Brown says.

BEST MAN OPERATES
Dr. Brown is married to the former Lula May Conwell, of Lavonia. He met her when 
he was at her home performing an operation on her father. She walked in while he 
was at the bedside of her father.

"How do you do?" she said, and Dr. Brown looked up. Before she had left the room, 
he had made up his mind to marry her.  And so they were married with Dr. Frank 
Boland, of Atlanta, as the best man, Dr. Boland stood up as best man and 15 
minutes later, he performed an appendectomy on the bride. She was stricken on the 
day of her marriage, but went on with the wedding.

So Dr.Brown continues, as the country surgeon who could have been among the top 
men in any hospital. He goes on with his work among the people he loves. He still 
performs as many as four operations a day, he always works, as he always has, 
about 16 hours a day.

"He's still the best man with the knife in all the world," the people of Royston 
say.

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