Outliers

I am currently reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell who also wrote; The Tipping Point and Blink. In the first chapter he talks about a group of people, Rosetans, who leave Italy to come to the New World for a better life. This group settles in Pennsylvania and starts their own town, first called New Italy and then changed to Roseto, the town they came from in Italy. 


Stewart Wolf was a physician who spent his summers on a farm near Roseto. One day another physician in the area tells him that he has patients from all over but he rarely finds anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease. This took Wolf by surprise because it was the 1950s and heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States so he decided to investigate. 


They analyzed physicians' records and took medical histories and constructed genealogies. There was little booths to take blood and do EKGs. All of Roseto was invited to be tested. The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease.  For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the U.S. as a whole.


There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction and very little crime. No one was on welfare and no one had peptic ulcers. Their diet wasn't better than the rest of the U.S., they didn't exercise, they smoked heavily and many struggled with obesity. Genetics didn't explain it or the area in which they lived. 


Wolf soon realized that the secret was Roseto itself. He looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. He saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and he saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. He picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures. 


Wolf told the medical world that they needed to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. 


I found this very interesting and also true and wanted to share it. 


November 18th~I am so very, very thankful for God's blessings in my life!