Public health officials announced that they had come to testpeople for "bad blood." No doubt they had the best of intentionsin using this language. By referring to "bad blood," healthofficers must have thought that they were speaking the ruralblack argot. But certain phrases have a generic quality. "Badblood" meant different things to different people among ruralblacks, and usually more than one thing to all of them. It wasa catchall phrase that referred to many different ailments. - P71