On one of Dr. Eleni Pappas’s first visits to Block Island in 1986, as she launched her South County Podiatry practice fresh from Temple Medical School, she arrived to find dead deer on the doorstep of physician Dr. Peter Brassard, then the resident island physician.
“Well, this is going to be a different experience,” she noted to herself as she stepped over ‘the gift’ and prepared to go to work, a journey that has encompassed 35 years of visiting the island to tend to hundreds, if not thousands, of patients, year-round.“Oh the stories,” she recounted with a warm smile in her Wakefield office one past Friday. “And the people, so many characters. I think many were simply delighted to have a new face to meet with in the middle of a dark winter and share tales from fishing, to farming.”
Dr. Pappas specializes in podiatric surgery, sports medicine, wound care, and diabetic care and wounds. “Often I’d meet the patient at the ferry in Galilee and take them straight to South County Hospital, including one when a patient stepped on a sewing needle that had gone all the way up inside the foot.”Dr. Pappas (no relation to the
