Jefferson Doctor's Office (Location Key)

The doctor's office in Jefferson is on the second floor of one of the buildings on the Courthouse Square. In the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, Doctor Peabody shares it with a new-comer, Doctor Alford, and the narrative uses the difference between Alford's antiseptic examination room and the warm clutter of Peabody's office as another marker of the distance between the Old and New Souths. As I Lay Dying includes a reference to "Alford's office" "upstairs" above the drugstore (241), although in that novel it is in Peabody's office that Cash Bundren's broken leg is reset. And after As I Lay Dying the only office ever referred to is Peabody's: it is where the Negro woman Boon shoots in The Reivers is treated, and Pap, in "Fool about a Horse," buys a "pint of whiskey" (129). Yoknapatawpha, like all of Mississippi during Faulkner's time, was dry, but it seems a doctor can dispense alcohol for medical purposes; Pap even calls the office "Doc Peabody's store." In two late novels Faulkner gives Peabody's office a specific location on the Square: above Christian's drugstore. We assume that it is also in Peabody's office that Benjy Compson is castrated in The Sound and the Fury, but the novel's reference to that operation is extremely vague.