Aunt Molly Kirby, as she was affectionately known by all, was the "doctor" to the people in the Coosa River area of Alabama. If it were not for her hiring and teaching a 7-year-old boy named Arthur Lee "Tommie" Bass, a lot of the knowledge of medicinal herbs would have been lost. She needed him because she was too old to climb the mountains to get the medicine. His education continued when he befriended a Cherokee woman who shared their medicine. He was hired by the pharmaceutical industry to get plants for their medicines and learned even more from that. It all started with Aunt Molly passing on her vast knowledge of how to help people with plants.