I don't know how I'd managed to not know about Emma Gatewood prior to picking up this book. She was quite well known back in the later 1950's for what was then a singular feat, through walking the entire Appalachian Trail ... In fact the first woman, and certainly the oldest person to attempt it,...
So little was known about her affliction, and the void was filled with terror. Though her husband’s main interest was infectious diseases, he knew far more about tuberculosis, which caused some thirty thousand deaths a year in the islands, than leprosy. Mycobacterium leprae was among the first ba...