ing no troops to
enforce orders and finding that mere advice incited downright
perversity. I administered potent drugs in person and left nothing to be
taken according to direction except placebos.

Once, in forgetfulness, I left a tablet of corrosive sublimate on the
mantel after dressing a wound, and the man of the house told me next day
that he had "'lowed to swaller it' and see if it wouldn't ease his
headache!" A geologist and I, exploring the hills with a mountaineer,
fell into discussion of filth diseases and germs, not realizing that we
were overheard. Happening to pass an ant-hill, Frank remarked to me
that formic acid was supposed to be antagonistic to the germ of
laziness. Instantly we heard a growl from our woodsman: "By God, I was
_expectin'_ to hear the like o' that!"

Ordinarily wounds are stanched with dusty cobwebs and bound up in any
old rag. If infection ensues, Providence has to take the blame. A woman
gashed her foot badly with an axe; I asked her what she did for it;
disdainfully she answered, "Tied it up in sut and a rag, and went to
hoein' corn."

An injured person gets scant sympathy, if any. So far as outward
demeanor goes, and public comment, the witnesses are utterly callous.
The same indifference is shown in the face of impending death. People
crowd around with no other motive, seemingly, than morbid curiosity to
see a person die. I asked our local preacher what the folks would do if
a man broke his thigh so that the bone protruded. He merely elevated his
eyebrows and replied: "We'd set around and sing until he died."

The mountaineers' fortitude under severe pain is heroic, though often
needless. For all minor operations and frequently for major ones they
obstinately refuse to take an anesthetic, being perversely suspicious
of everything that they do not understand. Their own minor surgery and
obstetric practice is barbarous. A large proportion of the mountain
doctors know less about human anatomy than a butcher does about a pig's.
Sometimes this ignorance passes below ordinary common sense. There is a
"doctor" still practicing who, after a case of confinement, sits beside
the patient and presses hard upon the hips for half an hour, explaining
that it is to "push the bones back into place; don't you know they
allers comes uncoupled in the socket?" This, I suppose, is the limit;
but there are very many practicing physicians in the back country who
could not name or locate the arteries of