DISCLAIMER: This website contains Amazon affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, we will receive a small commission.

Given that in the previous decade, almost all of them had come from the same village in italy in 1896, a dynamic young priest by the name of father pascuale de nisco, took over at our lady at mount carmel denisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the town folk to clear the land and plant onions beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The rosettans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine schools a park, a convent and a cemetery were built, small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along garibaldi avenue.

More than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring bangor was largely welsh in english, and the next town over was overwhelmingly german, which meant given the fractious relationships between the english and germans and italians in those years that rosetto stayed strictly for resentence. If you had wandered up and down the streets of rosetta in pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you’d have heard only italian spoken and not just any italian. But the precise southern fogian dialect spoken back in the italian rosetto rosetta pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world all but unknown, but the society around it and may well have remained so, but for a man named stuart wolf, wolfe was a physician. He studied digestion in the stomach and taught in the medical school at the university of oklahoma.

He spent his summers on a farm in pennsylvania not far from rosetta, although that, of course, didn’t mean much since rosetta was so much in its own world. It was possible to live one town over and never know much about it. One of the times when we were up there for the summer. This would have been in the late 1950s. I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society.

Wolf said years later, in an interview after the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer, and while we were having a drink, he said you know, i’ve been practicing for 17 years. I get patients from all over and i rarely find anyone from rosetta under the age of 65, with heart disease, wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950s years before the advent of cholesterol, lowering drugs and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the united states, they were the leading cause of death in men under the age of 65. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said and not see heart disease wolf decided to investigate he enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from oklahoma.

They gathered together the death certificates from residents of the town going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians records. They took medical histories and constructed family genealogies. We got busy wolf said we decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961 The mayor said all my sisters are going to help you.

He had four sisters, he said you can have the town council room. I said we’re going to have council meetings, he said well, we’ll postpone them for a while. The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths where we would take blood do ekgs. We were there for four weeks, then i talked with the authorities.

They gave us the school. For the summer. We invited the entire population of rosetto to be tested. The results were astonishing in rosetta, virtually no one under 55 had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease for men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in rosetta was roughly half that of the united states as a whole. The death rate from all causes in rosetta in fact, was 30 or 35 percent lower than it should have been wolf brought in a friend of his a sociologist from oklahoma named john brune.

To help him, i hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers and in rosetta we went house to house and talked to every person aged 21 and over broon remembers. This happened more than 50 years ago, but brune still had a sense of amazement in his voice, as he described what they found. There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare, then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either these people were dying of old age.

That’S it wolf’s profession had a name for a place like rosetta a place that lay outside everyday experience where the normal rules did not apply. Rosetto was an outlier. Wolff’S first thought was that the resettlements must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other americans, but he quickly, given that in the previous decade, almost all of them had come.

More From This Category