ABSTRACT
Hancock County was different. The people of Hancock County were mostly of Scots-Irish descent. Their ancestors had come in the 1700s and marched up the Cumberland Trail with Daniel Boone, settling in hilly high country with steep mountains and narrow creek and fertile river bottoms. But as soon as industrialization happened, there were other options, and the people who could compete in an industrial economy streamed away. The county's population was some 14,000 in the 1920s and 1930s. It was poverty of illiteracy, evaporation, concentration and abandonment, and from the perspective of most of America, Hancock County was out of sight, out of mind. Added to Hancock County's troubles was its healthcare system, which made a bad situation worse. In those years, the county had a 20-bed hospital, owned by the county but leased to the county's two doctors for a dollar a year. In Hancock County, the relationship between medicine, health, and economy was laid out starkly.
