A Fortuitous Detour

Birmingham native and internist Dr. Jerry Mosley reflects on his career and his decision to live in Jasper

Words by Terrell Manasco | Images by Blakeney Clouse 

Dr. Jerry Mosley might be delivering babies now if he’d just given up one habit. 

Many years ago, he was doing OB-GYN rotations at Cooper Green and Carraway Hospitals in Birmingham when he had had an epiphany. Exhausted from being up all night delivering babies, he thought to himself, I don’t think I can do this the rest of my life.

“One of my biggest faults is I need eight hours of sleep,” Mosley laughs. 

Besides that innocuous habit, Mosley might be located in another town, had fate not intervened. 

Born in Sheffield, Alabama, Mosley grew up primarily in the Birmingham area. His dad was a civil engineer for U.S. Pipe and the family moved around a few times. He attended Banks High School, did his undergraduate coursework at Auburn University, and attended medical school at UAB, where he also did his residency and internship. 

Though Dr. Mosley moved to Jasper in 1981, he narrowly missed being a doctor in Cullman. “I came to Jasper out of default,” he says. “I had looked at going to Starkville, Mississippi, with a friend who decided to go somewhere else. An older doctor in Cullman wanted me to come there.”

Mosley set his sights on Cullman, but never made it because he received a call from his friend, Dr. Steve Johnson. “He was working with Buddy Cross and Mike Brasfield,” Mosley remembers. “He said, ‘We need some help. Why don't you come out here and practice with us?’ I wanted to live in a small town, so I said I’d try it.”

The practice consisted of four physicians split into two groups. Drs. Johnson and Mosley teamed up and worked from an office in Carbon Hill, while the other two remained in Jasper. This practice led to them becoming involved with the football team. “Steve is from Carbon Hill,” Mosley says. “He loved that community and wanted us to get involved. We became their team doctors and started going to their games. We even traveled to their away games.” 

When Dr. Mosley’s son, Taylor, began playing for the Walker High team in 1990, Mosley moved his practice to Jasper and worked with the Vikings until Taylor graduated high school. “That was before (Coach) Bubba Davis was here,” he says. “They were more than happy to have somebody in internal medicine on the field. I wasn’t a lot of good for some of the orthopedic things that would happen.”

Davis’s strength, Mosley says, was that he knew how to get the community involved. “When Bubba came in, he kept people involved,” Mosley says. “He would drag you to physicals; he would just bring people in here. It was just simple things like colds, ears, infections, etc.” 

Dr. Mosley stayed on until the departure of Coach Davis’s successor, John Holladay, in 2013. 

His regular practice continued but sadly, one of the four partners, Dr. Charles “Buddy” Cross, passed away in 2012. Dr. Brasfield now has his own practice, and Mosley and Johnson continue to practice medicine together in a picturesque two-story office building on 19th Street in Jasper. 

Though the practice has been enjoyable, it has also presented its fair share of challenges. COVID-19 initially changed the way Dr. Mosley practiced medicine. While some doctor visits are conducted over the phone, Mosley prefers to see patients in person. 

“I can’t do telephone medicine,” he says. “I tried it briefly. I felt like I was not offering people what they really need as a physician. There’s a lot of art in medicine and getting people better that science doesn’t allow for.”

“I’m a dinosaur,” he grins. “I think you need to see people.”

When he has time to relax. Dr. Mosley enjoys painting. He also finds clay sculpting to be very therapeutic but admits it’s strictly for fun. “I was blessed in that I didn’t try to make a living. I would have starved to death,” he jokes. 

A family man, Dr. Mosley is married with three children. His wife, Lynn, is a physical therapist. Taylor is an ophthalmologist in Jasper. (“He’s very good at what he does.”) His older daughter, Erin, is an accountant, while his youngest, Kristen, is working on her doctorate in education at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Thirty-nine years ago, Dr. Mosley saw his first patient in Walker County. As for choosing Jasper over Cullman, Mosley says it proved to be a fortuitous detour. 

“It was a wonderful, serendipitous happening for me,” he says. “It’s been a great place to raise my family. I love Jasper. It’s home.” 78