tucky Highlands". It's a country rough and rugged, unfinished by Nature's hand. The author of the "Trail of the Lonesome Pine" has spread a glamor over this region-the glamor of romantic enchantment; those with other eyes, on other purpose bent, can tell a different story: real, sordid, pitiful! Aside from these two opposite quests-unless we bar the tragic accounts of the occasional feuds in Breathitt county-these people have been literally "forgotten of men". Of our own flesh and blood in an "American" sense, there are people in this region acquainted with a form of poverty that would make the average immigrant from Eastern Europe appear a Croesus by comparison; there are men,

women, and children by the thousands in this region who never again will see the light of day-or, seeing it, will curse it because of the very pain it causes them: blinded, living in darkness, unutterably helpless! Why so helpless? Because, incapacitated by their disease, the very counties in which they live are in many instances too poor to maintain an almshouse!

Perhaps the poverty can't

be helped. Perhaps the subject of this story has an important bearing as a cause of this extreme poverty-proof is at hand to show that it has. That is of minor importance just now; but so far as the almost inconceivably deplorable conditions which prevail are concerned our Government itself has thought it best, at last, to make at least a hasty investigation. This investigation deals exclusively with the innocently contracted disease of the eye known as trachoma. What it is, and the devastation it leaves in its wake, will appear as we follow the thread of the story.

"Forgotten of men," the present the present plight and blight of the people of this mountain region were "discovered" by some of the women of Kentucky by a slow and round-a-bout process. They were looking for one thing and found. another. But be that as it may, Kentucky has a Christian Temperance Union composed of women, and as a part of their educational work, they decided to establish a school settlement in the "Highlands," and the place of their choice fell on Hindman, up in Knott county, some twenty miles from the nearest railroad. Not at once, but indirectly and eventually, that first step, as the

result of woman's enterprise and endeavor, led to the revelation as herein presented. The women had established a settlement school, but few of the children were able to attend! More than education, they needed their sight! The numbers with eye trouble and on the way to permanent blindness were appalling. This deplorable state of affairs came to the attention of a Kentucky

doctor over in the "Blue Grass" region. He heard of the school settlement; he had heard vague rumors about the numbers afflicted with blindness in the "Highlands," in fact he had occasionally treated cases from there. He now made up his mind to make a personal investigation for his own satisfaction and in the interests of the Society for the Study of the Prevention of Blindness. When one single disease of the eye can cause from fifty to seventy-five per cent of all blindness, that disease is well worth looking into!

Therefore, Dr. Stucky of Lexington sent word to the school settlement that he was coming. That simple fact created a sensation up in the mountains; the people of that region, so long neglected, could hardly believe it. It was an event of a life-time!

This was in the month of April. After leaving the railroad, the doctor continued his quest on mule-back, at a time when

the roads were hard to find, harder to negotiate, and the mountain creeks were swollen with water running in torrents. Finally he arrived at the odd little village of Hindman, which runs up a steep incline in the very heart of this rugged region.

The following morning he made his way to a crude

cabin, called a "hospital" in honor of the occasion. Scores of people who had come from a radius of many miles around were patiently waiting in the vicinity of the cabin door. The doctor was astounded at their numbers; their condition appalled him. The horrible effects of trachoma were to be seen everywhere.

ness, and nothing in a systematic way being done to prevent it: and this in great, big, free-hearted America, where the city clinics are open free to all the foreign immigration which may come, while those people in Kentucky are pitifully groping their way in darkness, scarcely knowing that they can be helped; certainly not knowing that their disease is preventable, but willing to give their all for the least encouragement and assistance!

Every person with sore. eyes was asked how many in the family were suffering from the same disease. "And every last one of them," said the doctor later, "stated that he or she was not the only one. The picture of those surrounding me was one never to be forgotten, and I have lived amongst suffering all my life. There were women with sunbonnets, often with a black veil over the bonnets, sitting in rows with bowed heads; men with handkerchiefs over their eyes, and hats pulled down; babes with their little heads buried in their mother's arms; all trying to exclude the light of day from painful, pitiful eyes which were more or less rapidly going blind."

Many of these people had come twenty or thirty miles, and had walked every inch of the way. Even then scores of them were unable to be examined until the following day because of the numbers and the approach of darkness. All were finally attended to as well as the circumstances would permit. As a result of this first trip to the mountains, Dr. Stucky estimated roughly that fully twenty-five per cent of all the people of that region are

afflicted with

trachom a.

Think of it! One out of every four of them on the

road to blind

In the second week of September Dr. Stucky journeyed a second time into this region. This visit, taken in connection with the Government investigation made later, clinches the truth of the vast extent of the ravages of this sight-destroying demon among these unlettered people. On this occasion four nurses accompanied him-ten times that number would have been none too many!

By this time the school settlement at Hindman had a trained nurse, Miss Butler. She had already sent word of this. expected visit to every postoffice and schoolhouse within a radius of forty miles. On Monday morning early a crowd of mountaineers were awaiting the doctor. There were more men than women; the former, it is said, are considered of greater importance in that region. Old

men leaning on staves groped their way along with uncertain

step; strong, hale men with erect bodies but with felt hats pulled down to cover their eyes were led in from the valleys and mountain sides by the women folk and by mere children; young men, who in the

very morning of their lives must sit in darkness, were assisted from the backs of their scrawny but faithful nags; women in black bonnets or forlorn hats, with the additional protection of a handkerchief for the eyes, waited patiently, many of them with babes at their breasts; while children of all ages, in various stages of trachoma, wandered aimlessly about with the forlornness of a hope forever lost. In many instances whole families of seven or eight were shielding the painful light from their halfblinded eyes.

An old man, with eyelids grown fast to the balls, is questioned.

"How long have you been afflicted?" "Nigh onto thirteen year," he responds in a tone of resignation.

"How many are there in your family?" "Me'n the old woman and eight young ones."

"How many have sore eyes?"
"Well, just about ten of us."

The humor of the answer was outbalanced by the pathos.

An old lady from "Short Fork of Ball," and almost sightless from trachoma, was next questioned. She had been afflicted for four years. "Some calls it 'cat-tracks'," she explained quaintly. This poor old woman had walked eight miles, bringing on her arm a half-gallon of honey. "I'm a poor woman,' she volunteered, "and haint got no money, I would have fotch more but wan't able to carry hit." These instances merely hint at conditions.

It must be borne in mind that trachoma is a preventable disease, chronic in its course, contagious, and perhaps most pitiful of all, innocently acquired. For decades our Government has had its vigilant medical inspectors at all our ports of entry to guard against and immediately deport immigrants afflicted with this disease: but no thought, no time, no money has been expended to do a single thing for that one-fourth of the Government's own people who are now known to be afflicted in those "Highlands" of Kentucky. "Millions to protect ourselves against the invasion of disease from a foreign shore, but not one cent to help our own flesh and blood,"-that could well serve as our short-sighted motto!

The Government has investigated-oh yes, as we shall see further on--but the report lies virtually buried, as so often happens, in a certain department of the Treasury, of all places! And its field of usefulness is likely to end there, unless

someone, in some way, becomes sufficiently interested to take a hand in trying to blot out forever this worm in the rose, this un-American disease which has already spread to other mountain regions in the adjoining States.

A vigorous campaign of education would do much; these people are far distant from the aid and information which the systematized work in the darkest slums of the cities afford. One word of caution to the members of whole families who are

MORE TRACHOMA CASES.

work wonders. "Sixty to seventy-five per cent of the families are infected in some neighborhoods," says the Government report. "They all use the same large family towel for days," continues this same authentic source of information, "and this is one of the great causes in the spread of the disease."

Miss Butler, trained nurse at the settlement school-which, by the way, is doing all its resources will permit recently purchased one of these family towels, quite a "family affair," a real work of art, made of light-brown homespun, a yard and a half long and nearly as wide. The woman from whom she bought it held it up admiringly to show its "points."

"That there is a right smart towel you've got now," she commented with native pride, "hit is not only pretty, but hit is big enough for the whole school to wipe on!"

Unfortunately the humor of her remark is lost when we recollect that the use of similar towels by every member of the family in the cabin homes leads to eyeinfection from one to another, and explains why in some neighborhoods seventy-five per cent of useful Americans in those communities are literally on the road to everlasting darkness and uselessness!

Now comes our Government report. I don't know just how the deplorable state of affairs in the "Highlands" was first brought to the attention of

officialdom, but I surmise it began with the women who founded the school settlement. When the children began to come to the school, the good women were properly shocked by the appalling numbers with afflicted eyes. This nucleus of information spread. I know that Dr. Stucky was amazed as a result of his own investigations, and I surmise again that it was through Dr. Stucky and his revelations and insistence, that the Government decided to send one of its men-not to treat or help, mind you-but to investigate the alleged conditions. From present indications it would appear that the Government intends to do nothing for these people. Politically speaking, that would mean "centralization of Government," you understand, and we want none of that! Parenthetically, I wish to state that perhaps it isn't the function of Federal Government to render any immediate or direct assistance in conditions of this kind, but it is somebody's business. Something is wrong somewhere: others place a finger on this constitutional ulcer.

Let

In the name of the Public Health Service, Dr. John McMullen was sent to investigate and make a report. He did his full duty to the extent of his power and instructions. This investigation included Knott, Perry, Leslie, Breathitt,