It is a fair guess that Septembers bring two things: hurricanes and fall festivals, sometimes simultaneously. Last year, "Isabel" narrowly missed the 13th annual auction that the Amish and Mennonites of Lancaster County, PA hold to benefit their medical facility, The Clinic for Special Children. By the morning of that third Saturday in September, the big blow had passed, and the sun shown again on the event that drew 1,428 registered bidders to 3,228 items (most notably quilts), and a groaning board of pork barbeque, fried chicken, soft pretzels, freshly made potato chips and strawberry pies. The "English" came from all over, as their car license plates told. And, weather permitting, the same will take place again this September 18th, starting at 8:30 am (with quilts and major furniture pieces starting under the hammer at 11:15 am) inside the Leola Produce Auction, Brethren Church Road (off Rt. 23), Leola, PA (east of Lancaster).

The most attractive feature of this event, however, is not what it is, but what it does—providing support for what may be the best medical care for difficult diseases available anywhere in the world. The contrast between "the Plain People," who typically have neither automobiles nor electricity in their homes, but have become pioneers of molecular medicine, is nothing short of dumbfounding.

"Special children" is a euphemism for those born with inherited disorders, which, in the cases of the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, have a faith basis. Both sects trace their origin to a group of religious dissenters in Switzerland who performed the first adult baptism on January 21, 1525. Marriage within the faith kept the "Anabaptists" together, though they splintered into subgroup after subgroup. Genetic disorders of the founders then became amplified among their inbred descendants. About half of the 26,500 Old Order Mennonites living in Lancaster County today share only five surnames: Martin, Zimmerman, Hoover, Nolt and Weaver. Similarly, Zook, Yoder, Hershberger, King, Hochstetler and Miller are the most prominent family names among Lancaster's 16,000 Amish. Because of the so-called "founder effect," ten inherited diseases that present among the Old Order Mennonites are not found in the Amish; fourteen disorders of the Amish are not seen among the Mennonites. Other disorders that trace back to a time before their separation in 1711 are seen in both. In all, the Clinic for Special Children treats some eighty "inborn errors" that are rare—sometimes exceedingly rare—among Americans of European ancestry today. Relevant genealogy is kept in the Clinic's database, "MennGen," of 90,000 individuals living between the 1520s and now.

The Clinic itself sits between cornfields and cow pastures, off horse-trodden Bunker Hill Road south of Strasburg, PA. Its parking lot has horse rails and water buckets, and the building looks like the work of a barn-raising because it was. On November 17, 1990, fifty Amish and Mennonite farmers erected the frame, after which they held a dinner, like the scene in "Witness." Each family brought a dish and a blessing. Already, the Plain People had their doctor—Holmes Morton, a high-school dropout from the coalfields of West Virginia, who had been a boilerman in the Navy before "talking" his way into Trinity College, graduating with a Phi Beta Kappa key, and going on to Harvard Medical School. The Plain People had met him as a clinical geneticist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and it was to them that he felt "a calling." When newspaper reporters—especially one from The Wall Street Journal—began to pick up on this extraordinary story of a molecular country-doctor and the families who believe God sent him to save their faith, contributions came like manna from heaven.

This money, along with the auction proceeds, fees for services (for example, $35 for a genetic screening test that would cost $600 at a major children's hospital), and contract income for genetic testing, paid for most of the "high tech" equipment that is more often found at places like Johns Hopkins or the National Institutes of Health. The amino acid analyzer, however, was a gift from the Weaverland and Groffdale Mennonite Conferences.

What the Clinic brings to its patients not only is exemplary screening, but highly accurate diagnostics integrated into primary care, which follows the patients' health through everyday circumstances—preventing some crises and acting quickly when prevention fails. This is an important model even for patients who don't travel by horse and buggy.

There is nothing contradictory about the Old Order way of life and way the Clinic operates. Both derive from Romans 12:2: "And be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God." Since 1960, when geneticists from Johns Hopkins became the first "medical tourists" among the Plain People, these sects have engaged molecular medicine, prompting the Human Genome Project, as a means to a future. They are not anti-modern; they simply follow a different guiding light through the modern world.

In 1993, Dr. Morton received the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, and in the ceremony at The John Hopkins University, he said this: "Special children are people who hope to suffer less and lead fulfilled lives through the help of others. Within their families and communities they are not merely the object of compassion and love, but often are the very source. Special children shape the Amish and Mennonite cultures and inspire work such as that at the Clinic in important and forceful ways. We should not underestimate the value of their lives, however brief or however difficult. We should not assume that the Plain culture, or our own culture, would be better without them. . . if we allow them, they will teach us love." No better words express why this place exists, or what it means to the rest of us who for have to settle for medicine that far too often is less effective and more expensive.