Welsh Journals

.he was suffocated and then and there Immediately Dyed by Accident .9 That statement alone was sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the law The nineteenth century Two conflicting accounts of the state of health of the inhabitants of Gower appear during this period. Parts of the first account provide a somewhat idealized picture of a locality where disease was not as common as might have been expected. Gower without a doctor was written anonymously in 1886, and while it contains useful information, some of its contents must be viewed with caution.10 It was said not to be uncommon for people to live to ninety or a hundred years of age. Certainly in the 1840s, the death rate was significantly lower in Gower (15 per 1,000 of the population) than in Swansea (23 per 1,000)," and in the case of one woman, who did not know her own age: she had puzzled old father Time, who had carved so many furrows on her face and brow that he seemed to have given up the task in despair, for her eyes were bright and heart as light as if she was only in her teens. [At that time], they did not go the pace the world is going now The battle of life in Gower in those days was not a fierce one, for isolated from the warring world they were spared the wear and tear. The second picture that emerges may be less biased. Thomas Penrice, of Kilvrough Manor, wrote to the Secretary of State, Sir James Graham, in 1843 of a vastly different Gower, wherel2 'poor bare-footed women went with donkeys and panniers with cockles to Swansea market The relationship between poverty and some forms of illness must have been well known to him; even by the early 1890s, the average age of death in the peninsula was no higher than forty-one and a half years. 13 It might be said that much of the history of modem medicine consists of an ever-increasing widening of the gap between orthodox and folk medicine. Any rational approach to the treatment of illness must rely on the ability to make an accurate diagnosis, a discipline that has undergone