1893-1894 - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

APPENDIX. 217
has printer!, with able comments on the same, a number from persons living
in the malarious section of South Carolina. Some of them are so
striking and so convincing that we feel that any one who has been interested
enough to read this far will thank us for the opportunity of perusing
them also. We therefore append pertinent extracts aud desire to call
attention especially to the letters of Mr. Emerson and Dr.
Wilson.
[From Mr. J. R. Randall.]
* * * Yesterday I had an interview with Mr. Henry Yeatmau, who,
for a considerable period, resided in Princess Anne county, Virginia. The
conditions there are just such as exist in your low country. Mr. Yeatman
substantially said: "How many years of suffering I would have
escaped had I known or had I become convinced, as I am now, that the
fevers that scourged our country were produced by the surface well water
and not by the atmosphere, as nearly everybody believed, including the
doctors. I well remember how, more than fort}^ years ago, the Rev. Mr.
Gatewood, then a young man, was pitied for accepting a clerical charge
in our afflicted community. He was a fearless man and confidently predicted
that he would not get the prevailing diseases. Year after year he
remained among us and was totally exempt from our maladies. Every
}-ear people shook their heads and said: "He has escaped this time, but
wait until nest year. He is bound to get fever, chills and chronic dysentery,
like the rest of us." None of these ominous prophecies were fulfilled.
At last some of the neighbors waited on him and asked him to
tell them how he managed to keep perfectly well. He laughingly said:
" I do not dring water. Neither do I drink any spirituous or malt liquors.
I eat indiscriminately whatever I please—the same fare as yourselves. I
drink coffee and tea, but never touch water." Of course he meant raw
water, for he boiled it with his tea aud coffee. To this day Mr. Gatewood,
now an old man, abstains from raw water, and is a model of health. In
the immediate vicinity of our swamps the people dwelling there knew
that their shallow wells were daugerous. In every house a pot of water
was always kept boiling in the fireplace. The people there made a kind
of Yupon tea and drank of uothing else.
The}- never had any fevers or
consequential diseases. I see now that the boiled water alone, without
the boiled Yupon ingredient, would have sufficed. I do not see how any
man, with these and other kindred facts before him, can doubt for a
moment that malaqua and not malaria is the bearer of zymotic disease.
[From "Med."]
This water question is understood and appreciated by all the inhabitants
throughout this notoriously malarial region, for go wherever you will and
ask if the}- have fever, and the invariable reph- will be "Not much, or no,
for we have good water," or "Yes, you see the water is not good."