Contagious Connections: Recent Approaches to the History of Medicine in Early America

Abstract

Contagious Connections: Recent Approaches to the History of Medicine in Early America R. A. Kashanipour Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health. By Jeanne E. Abrams. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 314pages. Cloth, paper. Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America. By Elaine G. Breslaw. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 251pages. Cloth, paper. The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia. By Simon Finger. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012. 242pages. Cloth, ebook. Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824. By Paul Kelton. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. Cloth, ebook. Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World. By Billy G. Smith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013. 326pages. Cloth, ebook. Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures. By Kelly Wisecup. Native Americans of the Northeast. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. 271pages. Cloth, ebook. [End Page 141] What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. —Albert Camus, The Plague1 In 1800, Noah Webster published the second and final volume of his treatise called A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases.2 Sickness and diseases were ubiquitous in the colonial Americas. Authorized by an act of Congress, Webster aimed to identify, define, and classify diseases according to their history. Webster’s own experience with influenza and yellow fever outbreaks served as the inspiration for the etymologist to turn his attentions to the history of epidemiology. He spent nearly a decade conducting firsthand and historical research into common colonial ailments, including smallpox, influenza, and measles. Pestilential diseases, he argued, were the products not of simple contagion, the popular argument of the day, but of local processes and conditions. Epidemics developed and moved by invisible, even electric, mediums to structure individual experiences and organize society. He surmised that “epidemic diseases are the necessary effect of the laws that govern the universe. . . . Men, with their present natures, under a constant course of prosperity, would degenerate into brutes or devils. . . . I am persuaded the world without frequent inflictions of pain and distress, would not be habitable.”3 For the so-called father of American epidemiology, providential forces shaped the local representations of sickness and disease within the history and experience of the early British Americas. Webster, like many of his counterparts, was perplexed by the prevalence and prominence of disease in colonial American history. His model of epidemiology posited that sickness derived from infections, the physical environment, and atmospheric phenomena. He turned his attention to the long history of diseases in the ancient world and situated American epidemics as distinct products of local conditions. As such, he argued for defining yellow fever, common throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, as an “American plague,” which he believed moved according to undiscovered and mysterious patterns that were likely connected to the social conditions and physical properties unique to the Americas.4 He raised questions about why diseases aggressively struck particular groups, Natives in particular, ultimately concluding that diseases were reflections of morality and healing the product of divine intervention. [End Page 142] For Webster, the history of medicine centered on the social and cultural investigation of individual ailments, environmental conditions, social relations, and moral authority. At the heart of his study were questions about the biological nature of diseases, the vectors of transmission, social and political responses, and cultural understandings of the ailments themselves. The modern history of medicine in many ways continues to explore these broad questions. In the mid-twentieth century, J. H. Powell and John Duffy distinguished the field as a form of social history but returned to many of the fundamental issues tracked by Webster. Powell’s 1949 foundational work, Bring Out Your Dead, examined the 1793 yellow fever outbreak, an inspiration for Webster’s own study, as an example of American heroism and the courage of physicians.5 Similarly, Duffy’s 1953 classic study, Epidemics in Colonial America, charted the history of pestilential diseases, much as Webster had...