In spite of such apparent “toughness,” the mountaineers are not a notably healthy people. The man who exposes himself wantonly year after year must pay the piper. Sooner or later he “adopts a rheumatiz,” and the adoption lasts till he dies. So also in dietary matters. The backwoodsmen through ruthless weeding-out of the normally sensitive have acquired a wonderful tolerance of swimming grease, doughy bread and half-fried cabbage; but, even so, they are gnawed by dyspepsia. This accounts in great measure for the “glunch o’ sour disdain” that mars so many countenances. A neighbor said to me of another: “He has a gredge agin all creation, and glories in human misery.” So would anyone else who ate at the same table. Many a homicide in the mountains can be traced directly to bad food and the raw whiskey taken to appease a soured stomach.
Every stranger in Appalachia is quick to note the high percentage of defectives among the people. However, we should bear in mind that in the mountains proper there are few, if any, public refuges for this class, and that home ties are so powerful that mountaineers never send their “fitified folks” or “half-wits,” or other unfortunates, to any institution in the lowlands, so long as it is bearable to have them around. Such poor creatures as would be segregated in more advanced communities, far from the public eye, here go at large and reproduce their kind.
Extremely early marriages are tolerated, as among all primitive people. I knew a hobbledehoy of sixteen who married a frail, tuberculous girl of twelve, and in the same small settlement another lad of sixteen who wedded a girl of thirteen. In both cases the result was wretched beyond description.
The evil consequences of inbreeding of persons closely akin are well known to the mountaineers; but here knowledge is no deterrent, since whole districts are interrelated to start with. Owing to the isolation of the clans, and their extremely limited travels, there are abundant cases like those caustically mentioned in King Spruce: “All Skeets and Bushees, and married back and forth and crossways and upside down till ev’ry man is his own grandmother, if he only knew enough to figger relationship.”
The mountaineers are touchy on these topics and it is but natural that they should be so. Nevertheless it is the plain duty of society to study such conditions and apply the remedy. There was a time when the Scotch people (to cite only one instance out of many) were in still worse case, threatened with race degeneration; but improved economic conditions, followed by education, made them over into one of the most vigorous of modern peoples.
When I lived up in the Smokies there was no doctor within sixteen miles (and then, none who ever had attended a medical school). It was inevitable that my first-aid kit and limited knowledge of medicine should be requisitioned until I became a sort of “doctor to the settlement.”[8] My services, being free, at once became popular, and there was no escape; for, if I treated the Smiths, let us say, and ignored a call from the Robinsons, the slight would be resented by all Robinson connections throughout the land. So my normal occupations often were interrupted by such calls as these:
“John’s Lize Ann she ain’t much; cain’t you-uns give her some easin’-powder for that hurtin’ in her chist?”
“Old Uncle Bobby Tuttle’s got a pone come up on his side; looks like he mought drap off, him bein’ weak and right narvish and sick with a head-swimmin’.”
“Ike Morgan Pringle’s a-been horse-throwed down the clift, and he’s in a manner stone dead.”
“Right sensibly atween the shoulders I’ve got a pain; somethin’ ’s gone wrong with my stummick; I don’t ’pear to have no stren’th left; and sometimes I’m nigh sifflicated. Whut you reckon ails me?”