surgeons' reports — KENTUCKY — EIGHTH DISTRICT. 383 



are abundantly supplied witli excellent springs rising through the limestone. The remaining coun- 

 ties are generally broken and rough, but the purest air, most delightful scenery, and in ordinary 

 times the most healthful section of Kentucky is to be found iu our mountain-region. The inhab- 

 itants are generous, noble, liberal, intelligent, and as a general thing patriotic and loyal. The dis- 

 trict gave in favor of the new term to our lamented President a majority of twenty-four or twenty- 

 five hundred ; and although the third draft was enforced, we show upon a re-adjustment an excess on 

 future calls of some sixteen hundred men. 



As to the more grave, exciting causes of disease, we have nothing to complain of. On the 

 rivers and large creeks, we have periodic fevers; but there is no general exciting cause of disease 

 in the district. Of course, we have inflammatory diseases, pneumonia, pleurisy gastritis, rheuma- 

 tism, typhus and typhoid fevers. We rarely have any epidemics ; sometimes flux, during the months 

 of summer and autumn, rages in our district. 



The principal disqualifications are from injuries. Our people are nearly all farmers; occasion- 

 ally you meet a man who will tell you he is a merchant, and when yon begin to inquire into his avo- 

 cations you reduce him to the rank and file of a farmer. He, jierhaps, lives on a large farm, on 

 which he has a store-house about ten feet square. We of course have some merchants, who follow 

 that business to the exclusion of everything else; also a few lawyers, preachers, mechanics, &c. ; 

 but as a general thing our citizens are farmers. They live upon farms containing from one to sev- 

 eral hundred acres. They raise their own produce, manufacture their own clothes, tan their own 

 leather, make their own shoes, and live upon the products of their own lauds and thelabor of their 

 own hands. 



The counties of Garrard and Madison had a great many negroes, who did a vast amount of 

 labor; the whites not doing so much labor as in the other counties, which were and are more des- 

 titute of negroes. Our district has been sacked for the last four years; for we are u]ion the frontier, 

 separated from Jeff Davis's anticipated despotism only by a night and day's ride. Many of our best 

 citizens have been murdered, robbed, or carried off to die in loathsome southern prisons. Anxiety 

 and fear have been the most prolific causes of disease. Men have had to stay in the woods, exposed to 

 all kinds of weather, night and day. We have not known when we might not be killed or captured, 

 and there has been no security for us ; consequently exposure to cold has sapped the health of many 

 a man, and has enervated and ruined the constitutional vigor of numbers of our best men. We 

 have had practical knowledge of the horrors of war. 



Under paragraph 9, I have classified the number of exempted men. Of these, twenty-one were 

 exempted for chronic dyspepsia, nineteen for chronic gastritis, twenty-seven for haimorrhage of 

 the lungs and chronic bronchitis, with dilatations; all of these cases were somewhat complicated, 

 and accompanied with manifest permanent physical disability. Our real disqualifying disabilities 

 are hernia, fractures, and dislocations. Men in our district are accustomed to the hardest manual 

 labor from their earliest boyhood. Heavy lifting is the principal cause of hernia in our district. 

 Our country is heavily timbered, and men iu removing and clearing the trees from their land injure 

 themselves by heavy lifting, resulting frequently in hernia. Fractures and dislocations occur from 

 accidental falls from horseback, falling from precipices, and injuries from timber. 



As to my views iu reference to the difterent sections of paragraph 85, Revised Regulations, I 

 do not think I could make any profitable suggestions iu the way of changes or amendments thereto. 

 I think the diseases therein contained all disqualifying, and any case that may come into the 

 examiniug-room may be disposed of scientifically under the difterent sections embraced in that 

 paragraph. 



The number of men that can be examined with accuracy in a day does not, in my judgment, 

 exceed one hundred. 



The frauds most to he guarded against ichich are practiced by drafted men and enrolled men to avoid, 

 and hy recruits and suhstitutcs to enter, the service. — They practice any kind of artifices. Drafted 

 men feign a hundred diseases to avoid, and recruits maneuver to conceal their maladies. The 

 drafted man will tell you that he has consumption ; that he has disease of the heart; that he has 

 been afflicted for years. You see that he is alarmed when he enters the room: he runs off into an 

 enumeration of his troubles, and it is sometimes hard to quiet him. I generally meet the man 

 kindly, and use every efibrt to make him easy and quiet, and to calm him as much as possible. I 



