The Dentist Who Kept the Lights On in Appalachia

In the coal town of Bradshaw, West Virginia, Dr. Russell Meade opened a dental clinic in 2014 — the same year the last mine shut down and half the storefronts on Main Street went dark. Friends in Richmond told him he was burying his career. The numbers made no sense. But Russell had grown up twenty miles down the road, and he remembered what it felt like to have a toothache and nowhere to go.…