Dwalia South 
Una Voce 

Una Voce is a collection of the columns of Dwalia South M.D. which appeared in the JOURNAL: of the Mississippi State Medical Association under the same name. Each is a short vignette depicting a incident in the life of a small town family physician. We follow the course of her life from her beginnings as a farm girl raised on the Mississippi-Tennessee border, as a twenty-year old young woman on her first visit to Jackson, in a dress her mother sewed for her, as she interviews for medical school, then on to her rise to be the President of the Mississippi State Medical Association. She takes us through both life and death, her own bout with cancer, and the death of her beloved husband to the same disease. Her home ground is the land of the Faulkners, whence came Yoknapatawpha, Ripley, Mississippi is the town where Faulkners grandfather was gunned down in the town square, and it shows in every page of her writing. She mines that land of stories and lives like few writers before her. She is a writers writer, and a storyteller of the first order. Dr. South’s ties to William Faulkner are far deeper than geographic or kinship. Her writing mines the wealth of history and tradition that gave rise to Yoknapatawpha and all those that populated it. With that same insight she tells the stories of her home state and of medicine. Her heartfelt reflection of the people she serves and the lives she is privileged to share changes us, and that is a hallmark of great writing.