The people of Garden City, Kans., have always lived at the end of the world. In the 1870s and '80s, wagon trains plodded along the Santa Fe Trail for a month or more from Kansas City, on the state's eastern edge, to the scrappy little community near its western border. Even today the trip takes eight mind-numbing hours by car. No wonder Garden City (pop. 24,072) and hundreds of other rural communities in western Kansas have had a tough time persuading physicians to come and set up a practice. In fact, more than half the state's 105 counties are considered critically...
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