Our photograph, taken in the village of Austwick, features Dr Thomas Lovett, his family and a pet dog. Lovett, the village doctor in the 1920s and 1930s, was fond of driving around on a motorbike. He once took the machine to the open fell when his medical services were needed at Gaping Gill on Ingleborough.

Dr Bill Mitchell, of Giggleswick, recalls a colourful man and some other medical practitioners at a time when minor operations like removing tonsils might take place on kitchen tables. Much time was spent dispensing pills and potions.

My favourite story about a Dales doctor concerned a time when he was chatting with a farmer’s wife, hoping that her husband was taking his pills religiously. “Nay,” was the reply, “he swears every time I give him one.” Long years ago, when some areas were doctorless, another housewife remarked: “We dee naturally up here.”

Dr Thomas Lovett, who moved to Austwick from the Scottish Highlands, via the glens of Antrim, was irrepressible. He lived up to the family motto, which might be translated as “Never say die”.

His wife, Madeline, gave birth to a daughter in 1905 and was very ill. When she had recovered sufficiently to look around her and inquired where the baby was to be found, she was told that the wee child was out boating with her father. The young Dr Lovett, delighted at being a father, arranged a sea-cruise. He held the child; another man did the rowing.

This story was told to me by Sheila Lovett who for many years presided over Harden, a mansion-size home at Austwick from which lots of paying visitors explored the dale country. Harden, formerly the home of the Ingilby family, had a billiards room which, at the time of Dr Lovett, became a consulting room and laboratory.

Thomas Lovett was fond of undertaking scientific experiments. He was inclined to take out tonsils at the patients’ homes. He occasionally travelled to Leeds to administer anaesthetics in difficult operations. A car was used for travel about the district. He used his motorbike in the rougher terrain and for pleasure. There was a time when he moved across a snowy landscape on skis.

When his wife died in 1939, he gave Harden, a fine house standing in its own grounds, to his daughter, Sheila. She adapted it as a guest house and the guests admired the oaken fittings, including pieces of a four-poster bed, the uprights serving as pillars and the headpiece adorning a fireplace.

Will Pickles, of Aysgarth in Wensleydale, was a doctor of wide renown. He attended to dalesfolk for half a century and also found time, in a busy life, to make a major contribution to our medical knowledge. In 1928 – which, incidentally, was the year in which I was born – a severe epidemic of jaundice began in Wensleydale. The rapid spread of infection fascinated Dr Pickles.

He began to note “the short and only possible contact” in this and other epidemics. With the help of his wife, the incidence of infections day by day was noted. Each week, details were entered on a chart, which was kept for the next quarter of a century. This remarkable piece of research was undertaken not in a laboratory but in the whole dale and in a manner not previously attempted by a general practitioner.

National recognition – and many honours – came with the publication of his findings. Also for his research into a disease that he called Farmer’s Lung. This was caused by the repeated inhalation of dust from mouldy hay.

Dr Charles William Buck is now best-known through his friendship with the composer Edward Elgar, who, when visiting him at his home in Giggleswick, sometimes shared the pony and trap in which Buck visited his well-scattered patients.

Buck moved his family from Giggleswick to the big house in the Market Place at Settle in about 1890. The surgery was on the ground floor. Here the doctor tapped chests, prescribed medicines – and drew teeth. The medicines he dispensed in bottles included a mixture for sweating and another for “breaking phlegm”.

A lady born in 1896, looking back down the years to when she was eight years old, recalled Buck, the doctor, as “a very pleasant gentleman…He was always kind to kiddies and made a big of a fuss of us”. Another said: “I had appendicitis when I was eight. He kept me in bed for ten days on nothing but drinks. I couldn’t walk so well when I got up. They had to carry me up and down the stairs for a while.”

Most births were normal, though one late October day Mrs Williamson of Clapham gave birth to a fine boy weighing some 9lb 10oz. It was not an easy birth. Buck noted: “Applied forceps. Chloroform”. Mrs Carr, of Long Preston, was found on the floor, kneeling over a chair, with her face towards the fire, as the pains got stronger. Buck noted: “A fine boy was born half an hour after getting into bed.”

He attended Mrs Winskill of Kirkgate, Settle, when there was a breech birth. Buck “got legs down and pressed occupant from above – got uppermost arm down past head and then slightly rotated the child and got the lower arm down with difficulty. The head was born at 5.30. The child was almost dead. Artificial respiration and cold water and inversion restored it.”

On his rounds of patients, Buck preferred to be driven, electing to sit at the back of the trap to escape the worst effects of the moorland breezes. In snowtime, he might harness up a single horse and ride to patients in need. Such journeys ended at remote farmsteads on Malham Moor, over 1,000ft above sea level.

Buck had retired in the early 1920s. Henceforth he lived a quiet life.

His grave – and that of wife and son – is situated in the upper and older part of the graveyard at Giggleswick.