Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884
Various
Science -- Periodicals
Nearly all the people of the Tablelands are employed in the pursuits of
agriculture. Very few of them seem to be hard workers. The men are all
great lovers of the forest sports, much given to the good, reliable, old
fashioned long rifles. The women and children are much employed in out
door occupations, and live a great portion of their time in the open
air. The clothing of all classes is scanty. The use of woolen fabrics
for underwear has not yet been introduced, and coarse cotton domestic
is the universal shirting, and cotton jeans, or cotton and wool mixed,
constitute the staple for outer wearing apparel. The men wear shoes
throughout the year much more commonly than boots. They never wear
gloves, mittens, scarfs, or overcoats, and they scorn umbrellas.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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