Probably this whole 4,000 people do not possess two dozen umbrellas or
twice as many overcoats. The women go about home with bare feet a great
part of the summer. They never wear corsets or other lacing.
I have learned by careful inquiry that very few of the people of the
Ridge have ever had the diseases of childhood. Scarlet fever I could
hear of in but two places, and I suppose that not one person in fifty
has had it. Whooping cough and measles have occurred but rarely, and the
large majority have not yet experienced the realities of either. Very
few people there have ever been vaccinated, nor has smallpox ever
prevailed. Typhoid, typhus, and intermittent fevers are unknown. In the
great rage of typhoid fever which took place ten or twelve years ago in
the Tennessee and Sequatchee Valleys, not a single case occurred on the
Mountains, as I have been informed by physicians who were engaged in
practice in the neighborhood at the time. Diphtheria has never found a
victim there; so of croup. Nobody has nasal catarrh there, and a cough
or a cold is exceedingly rare.
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