Dr. Donald E. Campbell; Norman Rockwell Model

Dr. Donald E. Campbell, a small-town doctor who made house calls for more than half a century and was a model for one of Norman Rockwell’s most famous paintings, has died at 95.

Campbell, who died Monday at home, was the only doctor in this small western Massachusetts community for decades.

Rockwell, a neighbor and patient of Campbell’s, used the kindly doctor as a model for several illustrations, including “Before the Shot,” which he painted for the cover of Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1958.

The famous picture shows Campbell preparing a shot for a bare-bottomed youngster as the boy suspiciously examines his framed medical degrees.

In a 1989 interview, Campbell called Rockwell “shy, genial, happy and a noncomplainer.”

Campbell charged $2 for an office visit and $3 for a home visit when he hung out his shingle in 1939 after graduating from Middlesex Medical School, now Brandeis University.

He often took his fee in vegetables, venison or firewood. Although his office hours ended at 4:30 p.m., longtime patients knew he was available after supper.

Before the town had an ambulance squad, Campbell was the first one police called to accident scenes. Generations of children took their sick dogs, birds and turtles to him, and he treated them too.

He did his own laboratory work and developed his own X-rays between examinations in his cluttered office on Main Street and kept making house calls until he retired on his 83rd birthday.

It was no way to get rich, Campbell said in the 1989 interview, “unless you mean rich in spirit.”