During the ten years that I have practiced medicine in the neighborhood
of the Cumberland Tablelands, I have often heard it said that the
people on the mountains never had consumption. Occasionally a traveling
newspaper correspondent from the North found his way down through the
Cumberlands, and wrote back filled with admiration for their grandeur,
their climate, their healthfulness, and almost invariably stated that
consumption was never known upon these mountains, excepting brought
there by some person foreign to the soil, who, if he came soon enough,
usually recovered. Similar information came to me in such a variety of
ways and number of instances, that I determined some four years ago,
when the attempt to get a State Board of Health organized was first
discussed by a few medical men of our State, that I would make an
investigation of this matter. These observations have extended over that
whole time, and have been made with great care and as much accuracy
as possible, and to my own astonishment and delight, I have become
convinced that pulmonary consumption does not exist among the people
native and resident to the Tablelands of the Cumberland Mountains.
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