Philippa Koch. The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America.

Abstract

Illness and religion were two of the most important factors that shaped eighteenth-century lives. Philippa Koch’s new book examines the intersection of these two phenomena—specifically, the intersection of Protestant theology and devotional practice with the almost constant experience of illness, injury, and childbirth, and the ever-present possibility of death. The book asks: how did eighteenth-century people use religion to understand their experience? The answer, according to Koch, is an understanding of illness and suffering rooted in a Providential worldview: Ill-health, both of an individual or a society, is part of God’s larger plan. Koch traces this worldview through a series of chapters that consider ministerial writings on health and disease; laypeople’s own narratives of illness; illness as a collective problem to be solved; and the experience of childbirth and infant mortality. The book offers new and useful perspectives on many familiar topics. For instance, Koch retells the familiar story of Cotton Mather and smallpox inoculation but takes this as a chapter in religious history rather than the history of medicine. She argues that Mather saw a commitment to public health as a Christian obligation. As a minister, he was required to heal communities and bodies as well as looking after individual souls. Advocating for inoculation was a way of enacting God’s plan and healing spiritual as well as physical corruption.