The Province of Affliction

Illness and the Making of Early New England

Ben Mutschler

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226714561
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

In The Province of Affliction, Ben Mutschler explores the surprising roles that illness played in shaping the foundations of New England society and government from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. Considered healthier than people in many other regions of early America, and yet still riddled with disease, New Englanders grappled steadily with what could be expected of the sick and what allowances were made to them and their providers. Mutschler integrates the history of disease into the narrative of early American social and political development, illuminating the fragility of autonomy, individualism, and advancement. Each sickness in early New England created its own web of interdependent social relations that could both enable survival and set off a long bureaucratic struggle to determine responsibility for the misfortune. From families and households to townships, colonies, and states, illness both defined and strained the institutions of the day, bringing people together in the face of calamity, yet also driving them apart when the cost of persevering grew overwhelming. In the process, domestic turmoil circulated through the social and political world to permeate the very bedrock of early American civic life.

Notes

Introduction

1. The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, ed. Elaine Forman Crane (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 1: 226. Drinker dated the entry “Augt. 20 or 21” and added to the entry over time, penning an update on Henry’s condition on September 6. Drinker often commented on the heat in the city in the late summer, including a note a week before Henry became ill that it was “very hot” (August 14, 1777). That the heat continued into the following week is conjecture on my part. For a genealogy of the Drinker family, see Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 1: lxxi–lxxiv and 157 for Henry’s birth. For worms and children, see Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1987), 189–90. For a suggestive treatment that explores the theme of the “precariousness of life,” including the many illnesses of Drinker’s children, see Helena M. Wall, “‘My Constant Attension on My Sick Child’: The Fragility of Family Life in the World of Elizabeth Drinker,” in Children in Colonial America, ed. James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2007), ch. 9.

2. For the full course of Henry’s illness, see Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 1: 226–49. Quotes from September 9, 15, 28, and October 26.

3. See, for example, Elaine Forman Crane, “‘I Have Suffer’d Much Today’: The Defining Force of Pain in Early America,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 370–403.

4. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” reprinted in Early American Writings, ed. Carla Mulford (New York: Oxford, 2002), 238–45. Stephen Foster provides an excellent overview of affliction in seventeenth-century New England, chiefly in the context of poverty and poor relief, and suggests that the ideas surrounding affliction carried into the eighteenth century. See Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 127–52, comment on eighteenth century, 132n13.

5. On New England as atypical, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). On New England in the Atlantic world, recent studies of Boston have been especially important: Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), and Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (New York: Norton, 2016). On New England’s precocious regulation of public life, including poor laws and taxation, see Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch. 2, which argues that sophistication in its tax regime did not mean its tax laws were progressive; Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution (2009; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), ch. 1; Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 44–46, 49–50, 53–54. On public health, see note 7, below.

My focus on New England has two significant limitations. First, I do not treat Native Americans at any length. This is because there is already excellent work that has been done to recover native medical practices and, especially, the ways in which the afflictions of Indians became part of provincial governance in New England. On the former, see, for example, the recent work of Kelly Wisecup, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). On the latter, see Daniel R. Mandell, Beyond the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), chs. 4–5, who ties the social and financial costs of illness to Indians’ loss of land. Second, I do not focus on church charity or the church as an institution. Here, again, there has already been significant work on clergymen and connections to healing, the charitable work of churches, and the strengths and weaknesses of churches throughout the eighteenth century. The material is so rich that it would have warranted another book project to break new ground. See, for example, Patricia Ann Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), and Douglas L. Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

6. R. A. Kashanipour, “Contagious Connections: Recent Approaches to the History of Medicine in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 73 (January 2016): 141–59, is a thoughtful overview. This note and the three that follow can only gesture toward a few of the pertinent works. John M. Murrin, “Beneficiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in America,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 3–23; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999); Alfred Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (April 1976), 289–99; and David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (October 2003), 703–42. Gerald N. Grob’s The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) synthesizes much of work on morbidity and mortality in North America and the United States, from conquest through the twentieth century.

7. On public health in New England, see John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953); John Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630–1822 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); and Andrew Wehrman, “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’: A Medical Revolution in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1764–1777,” New England Quarterly 82 (September 2009): 385–429. Other helpful works on public health include Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Simon Finger, The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), which offers a recent effort to integrate public health concerns into the larger constellation of politics in colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia; and William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), ch. 6. Jeanne E. Abrams, Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health (New York: New York University Press, 2013), has argued that the Founders’ intimate experience with sickness and death in their families helps explain their concern for public health measures deemed necessary to support the health of the people.

8. A substantial body of work focuses primarily on New England. On therapeutics, healing, and the medical marketplace in New England, see J. Worth Estes, Hall Jackson and the Purple Foxglove: Medical Practice and Research in Revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1979); Philip Cash, Eric H. Christianson, and J. Worth Estes, eds., Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620–1820, vol. 57 of Collections (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1980); Eric Howard Christianson, “The Colonial Surgeon’s Rise to Prominence: Dr. Silvester Gardiner (1707–1786) and the Practice of Lithotomy in New England,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 136 (April 1982): 104–14; and Christianson, “The Emergence of Medical Communities in Massachusetts, 1700–1794: The Demographic Factors,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 54, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 64–77; Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Norman Gevitz, “‘Pray Let the Medicines Be Good’: The New England Apothecary in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Pharmacy in History 41, no. 3 (1999): 87–101; Peter Benes, ed., Medicine and Healing, vol. 15 of Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Boston: Boston University, 1990); Watson, The Angelical Conjunction; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991); Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, ...