University of Arkansas Press Publishes Fiat Flux, Work of Country Doctor and Philosopher

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published Fiat Flux: The Writings of Wilson R. Bachelor, Nineteenth-Century Country Doctor and Philosopher ($34.95, cloth), edited and introduced by William D. Lindsey, with an accompanying book signing scheduled for Friday, Sept. 6, in Little Rock.

The book includes diary entries, occasional pieces, and letters from Wilson R. Bachelor, a Tennessee native who moved with his family to Franklin County, Arkansas, in 1870. Bachelor was a country doctor and natural philosopher who chronicled his life from 1870 to 1902, documenting his family’s move to Arkansas, their settling a farm in Franklin County, his medical practice, and his thoughts about life and the world.

Bachelor was an avid reader with wide-ranging interests in literature, science, nature, politics and religion, and he was a self-professed freethinker. He was driven by a concept he called fiat flux, an awareness of the “rapid flight of time” that motivated him to treat the people around him and the world itself as precious and fleeting.

The doctor wrote occasional pieces for a local newspaper, bringing his unusually enlightened perspectives to the subjects of women’s rights, capital punishment, the role of religion in politics, and the domination of the American political system by the economic elite in the 1890s.

These essays, along with family letters and the original diary entries, are included here for an uncommon glimpse into the life of a country doctor in 19^th century Arkansas.

Dale and Betty Bumpers, the former governor and first lady of Arkansas, said the book “portrays the courage, independent action and determination that it took to live a life practicing medicine on the ‘wild frontier’ of western Arkansas in the second half of the 19th century.”

William D. Lindsey is the author or coauthor of several books, including Religion and Public Life in the Southern Crossroads: Showdown States.

Lindsey will discuss and sign Fiat Flux from 4:30-6:30 p.m. on Sept. 6 at the Active Learning Center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Library in Little Rock. The event is free and open to the public.

The University of Arkansas Press was founded in 1980 as the book publishing division of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.