ANTIQUATED LIFE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 12, 16 January 1933, Page 7

ANTIQUATED LIFE

KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS

WOMAN. DOCTOR'S STORY

(From "The Post's" Representative.) NEW YOBK, 26th October. Dr. Alfreda Withington, who served in France during the Great War under the Bed Cross and th© Rockefeller Foundation, N found it difficult, oa her return, to settle, down to conventional practice, and betook herself to the Kentucky Mountains. She chose a territory some distance from the railroad, lying between Kingdom Come ana Hell-for-Sartin, where her sick calls took her across such glamorous trails as God-3Torsbok Gap. Her e'o-wbrker in this benevolent enterprise, was her horse, Billy. "Love me, love my horse," she says, recounting her experiences in the '■'Atlantic Monthly." "He is always willing to leave his oats for an emergency call; sensing the necessity, he speeds on the outward trip, but uses his prerogative of duty performed to snatch a few oak leaves on his return. In snake season, I have to keep1 my eyes open for rattlers and copperheads as I ride along the narrow defiles."

With the exception of an occasional drummer and a man who buys livestock, no one from the. outside visits Dr. Withington 's territorjy—except bootleggers. She ministers to maintain people who have been marooned there for 150 years. They do not undress to go to bed at night, as men and women, boys and girls occupy the same room. There is no sanitation. Hookworm and infectious diseases levy considerable toll.

The "Mountain' Doctor" is trying to convert them to public programme. She holds mothers' meetings, gives physical examinations, treats hookworm cases, preaches the need of screens to keep out the myriads of flies, and urges the building of outhouses, of which only a very few exist, here and there. BELATED FUNERALS. Funerals arc held long after deathyears, perhaps—whenever the finances of the family are equal to the occasion. Usually, -several preachers are secured, after crops are gathered—and crops are low—and the funeral is often for several members of the family at once. Dr. Withington attended the funeral of an old man wju> had been, dead eight, years. The services lasted for hours. Menfolk wandered off for a smoke or a drink. The first preacher said nobody could get to Heaven unless he graduated through his particular church. This disturbed one of the family, who whispered that Uncle Cal had no church. He was reassured by a friend who said Uncle Enos would preach next, and he was equal to any occasion: he would get Uncle Cal into Heaven all right and Uncle Enos did, in a remarkable panegyric of the dead. "But" he added, "if Uncle Cal had belonged to any of those other churches, he would probably not get through." At a cabin, at the foot of a precipitous descent, which her horse could not negotiate, Dr. Withington found a little girl, ill with pneumonia. In a corner stood a big branch of holly, which served for a Christmas tree, trimmed with coloured pictures of toys, cut from a mail-order catalogue.