The Angel of Ashland
Subtitle: Practicing Compassion and Tempting Fate
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: November 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 150
ISBN-13: 9781573928311
Subjects: Biography & Autobiography; Christian spirituality; History of medicine; Physicians; Biography/Autobiography; Biography; Biography / Autobiography; Pennsylvania; Medical - Physicians; History; Abortion & Birth Control; Spencer, Robert Douglas,; Medical - General; 1889-1969; Abortion
First sentence: Dr. Robert D. Spencer stood at the scrub sink in his eleven-room clinic located in the 500 block of Center Street in the town of Ashland in the hard-coal region of Pennsylvania.
Description: "One evening in late January of 1969, the lead story on the Huntley-Brinkley Report was the death of Dr. Robert D. Spencer, also known as the "Angel of Ashland." It was reported that Spencer had performed 100,000 abortions during his medical career, which spanned over half a century, from the 1920s to that day. All this occurred in the sleepy little coal-mining town of Ashland, Pennsylvania.".

"Mesmerized by the news story, then college student Vincent J. Genovese, who was himself raised in Minersville, a similar mining town not more than ten miles from Ashland, began a quest to find out more about Spencer. The result is The Angel of Ashland, the biography of a courageous and principled doctor."--BOOK JACKET.