Konnarock, Virginia, is a village of perhaps three hundred, stranded three thousand feet above sea level in the cutover desolation left by the lumber companies that finished logging the Iron Mountain Range twenty-five years ago. Before the coming of the loggers, Konnarock was a crossroads trading center for the 18th-century Scotch-Irish pioneers who settled along one of Boone’s wilderness ridge trails.

Konnarock lies on the eastern fringe of the Tennessee watershed. There are men and women not yet old who can remember what the Konnarock Valley was like in the old days. The virgin pine and the hardwoods, they tell you, were so tall that when you traveled the roads and trails that connected the clearings you walked in a cathedral twilight populous with deer, bear, and “a curiosity of squirrels.” Trout filled the streams. People lived chiefly by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild berries, nuts, and herbs. Farming consisted of clearing a strip of forest, planting it to corn until within a few years it ceased to yield, and then clearing a new strip. Nobody was rich, but neither did anybody go hungry, nor was sickness common. People had more energy, pellagra was unknown, and the women rarely had trouble bearing their children.

In 1947 I went along with a party of TVA agronomists and nutritional consultants sent to make a study of soil, plant, animal, and human nutritional relationships—a study for which the eroded hill farms, the scrawny cattle, and the pellagric natives of the Konnarock valley provided an ideal laboratory. With respect to problems, at least, Konnarock had everything. To replace their forest birthright and their 18th-century backwoods self-sufficiency, the mountain people had acquired a patchwork economy of scarcity, propped from the outside by a dozen private and public educational, health, and welfare subsidies. Health was both the worst problem and the one about which most had been done. The key institution in the valley was the medical center established in 1939 by the Board of American Missions of the United Lutheran Church, and the key person was Dr. Heinz C. Meyer, a graduate of the University of Berlin who in 1940 became its director.

Dr. Meyer and his wife, who is a trained nurse, are Jewish in origin, Lutheran in religion. Before they came to Konnarock it cost $25 to bring a physician in from Damascus, twelve miles down the mountain; the people “had to kill a hog to get well,” and few of them were well. Tuberculosis and pellagra were everywhere.

At first the mountain men and women were suspicious of the stranger who was also a Jew. He won them by passing a few of the miracles that are not difficult for a physician who is dealing with acute deficiency diseases and is equipped with the knowledge and materials of modern nutritional therapy. A veteran with a paralyzed leg and severe sciatica got up and walked to work a week after getting massive doses of thiamin. A leading citizen who had declared that salad vegetables were only “fitten for rabbits” collapsed unconscious on the street. Three weeks of rest and heavy doses of the B-complex put him on his feet and won his fervent public support of the doctor’s newfangled dietary notions, which featured not only fresh vegetables, but the Jewish pumpernickel the doctor imported for his own household while denouncing the native addiction to corn pone, fatback, and soda pop. More and more, Dr. Meyer was able to substitute dietary instruction for pills and injections. Soon his prestige became so commanding that mountain mothers, while we were there, walked eight miles just to ask him: “What shall I give my family to eat?”

Today there is practically no pellagra left in the Konnarock Valley, and very little tuberculosis. The regional state health officer writes: “The people in this area receive better prenatal and well-baby care than in any comparable section in the state of Virginia. Infant morbidity and mortality are below the average for the state. Diseases of childhood, such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, pneumonia, etc., have practically disappeared. Due to careful prenatal examinations, the rate of prematures and stillborns is greatly below the average of the state. . . . The general health and well-being of the people of Green Cove and the Konnarock section is as good and perhaps better than anywhere, not only in Washington county, but in this section of Virginia.”

What has it taken to provide one of the most isolated communities east of the Mississippi with better than average medical care, and how does Dr. Meyer manage to “take it”? Dr. Meyer’s own testimony will best answer these questions. He writes: “Two diametrically opposite ways offer themselves to the immigrant: to give up his past completely and to embrace the present and future in an attempt to let himself be absorbed; or to venerate the background which had shaped his personal characteristics and at the same time to love the new with all its values and beauties as well as its frailties and apparent deficiencies. Out of this love, he will derive the ability and the strength to work and live creatively. . . . In all humility, I believe that I am respected as a physician by the majority of the people of this section—by no means loved by all, which I think is very healthy—occasionally taken into confidence in non-medical matters by some, and of guiding influence in a few cases. Our work has made us happy and positive in our approach to problems. But we would have failed had it not been for the wholehearted backing we have received from our church, its leading men and women, and the good will of our neighbors.”

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Actually the physical isolation of the rural physician is not very formidable, except in places like Konnarock or the Indian reservations, where a dozen émigré physicians were assigned in 1941, and where at least half of them still remain. Such assignments, of course, are likely to require the dedication of the missionary added to that of the physician.