Disease in colonial America facts for kids

When the first European settlers came to America, they faced many dangers. One of the biggest threats was disease in colonial America. Many diseases were new to them, and the treatments available often didn't work. For example, Malaria was very deadly, especially in the Southern colonies. A lot of new arrivals, including young men, died within a few years. Babies and young children were also at high risk from diseases like diphtheria, smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria.

Most sick people in colonial times went to local healers or used traditional home remedies. Some also got help from minister-physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries (like pharmacists), and midwives. A few doctors had training from Britain or learned through apprenticeships in the colonies. A common treatment was blood letting, which involved removing blood from the patient. This method was often crude because people didn't understand much about infection or how diseases spread. There wasn't much government control over medical care or public health. Later, in the 1700s, colonial doctors started bringing more modern medical ideas to cities, making progress in areas like vaccination and understanding the human body.

Doctors and Healers

In Colonial America, medical care was given by many different people. These included local doctors, midwives, folk healers, and even town officials. There wasn't a clear difference between a physician and a surgeon. If someone had an emergency, the person giving care was expected to handle everything. In many places, families passed down medical knowledge and remedies through generations.

Some important doctors lived in Colonial America, especially in bigger cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston. The very first medical schools in America were started in Philadelphia and New York late in the colonial period.

Thomas Thacher

Thomas Thacher was a well-known Puritan preacher and doctor. He came to America when he was fifteen and learned a lot about medicine. Thacher spent much of his time practicing medicine and became a leading doctor in Boston. Shortly before he died in 1677, he wrote a short paper about smallpox and measles. This was the first medical paper ever published in America.

Giles Firmin

Giles Firmin was a deacon in Boston who came from England in 1632. While working as a doctor in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Firmin became the first person to give anatomy lectures in America. He gave detailed talks about dried bones. This made the General Court (the colony's government) interested in 1647. They suggested that anatomy lectures should be given at least once every four years. However, this idea wasn't followed, and anatomy wasn't taught for a while.

John Winthrop Jr.

John Winthrop Jr. was a doctor who often wrote to England for advice on medical topics and diseases. Winthrop understood that the Colony needed trained doctors. In 1643, he received eight pages of notes from an English doctor about herbs and how to use them to cure diseases. Winthrop used this knowledge to advise people in the Colony. He wasn't formally trained in medicine and relied heavily on these notes for diagnosis. Winthrop suggested various ointments, nauseous remedies, cupping, bandages, and baths. His son later took over his medical practice.

Epidemics

Many widespread outbreaks of animal-borne diseases happened during colonial times. Smallpox was especially common. Malaria was also always present, particularly in the southern colonies, where almost everyone was expected to get infected at some point.

Yellow Fever

Yellow fever caused thousands of deaths and made many people flee affected areas. It starts with a headache, backache, and fever, making the patient very sick quickly. The disease gets its name from the yellow color the skin turns on the third day. Within a week, the person is either dead or getting better. Yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes. When a mosquito bites an infected person, it carries the disease for life and can pass it to other humans.

Yellow fever first appeared in America in 1668. It reached Philadelphia, New York, and Boston in 1693, brought over from Barbados. Throughout the Colonial period, there were several epidemics in these cities, as well as in Texas, New Hampshire, Florida, and up the Mississippi River as far as St. Louis, Missouri. During these outbreaks, people who stayed often avoided others by staying inside their homes. Businesses stopped, and many people lost their jobs. The death rate was so high that people had to work day and night to bury the dead.

Smallpox

Smallpox is caused by the variola virus. It is extremely contagious and spreads through physical contact, affecting both children and adults. Smallpox was disfiguring and often deadly. Outbreaks of the disease happened often and caused great devastation.

A very severe series of smallpox outbreaks occurred in Boston, Massachusetts. From 1636 to 1698, Boston suffered six epidemics. In 1721, the most severe outbreak happened. Many people fled the city, accidentally spreading the virus to the rest of the Thirteen Colonies.

Colonists tried to stop smallpox by isolating sick people and using inoculation. Inoculation caused a mild form of the disease. It was new and very controversial because the procedure itself could sometimes be fatal or spread the disease. Zabdiel Boylston and Cotton Mather introduced it in Boston in 1721. The process involved injecting a small amount of the infection into the patient. This usually resulted in a milder case of smallpox, which was shorter than if they had caught it naturally.

Strong support for inoculation came from the leading Puritan minister, Cotton Mather. He preached for inoculations during the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston. His advice was mostly followed by well-educated, wealthy Puritan families. The town of Cambridge and Harvard College combined widespread inoculation programs with inspection and isolation efforts. They provided a model that other New England communities followed, adopting immunization and quarantine policies more and more by 1800.

South Carolina, however, resisted inoculation. James Kilpatrick, a British doctor, strongly promoted vaccination in the mid-1700s, but he couldn't convince the local medical and political leaders.

Other Colonial Diseases

While yellow fever and smallpox were very destructive, many other diseases affected Colonial America. In the early days of settlement, people brought contagious diseases with them. After African slaves were brought over, more serious parasitic diseases arrived in Colonial America.

Malaria

The cause of malaria was unknown until 1897. Colonial doctors thought it was caused by "miasma" or bad air. In reality, this disease is caused by a parasite found in certain types of mosquitoes. These mosquitoes bred more quickly as new land was cleared in the Carolina lowlands for growing rice. The parasite found a home in the slaves, who then infected the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes then spread the parasite to other slaves and the white population, quickly creating communities with high rates of malaria. The disease spread across the South and Northwest. People newly arrived from Europe were especially vulnerable to the deadly forms. However, after the second generation, colonists usually had non-fatal cases, often experiencing a feverish season for a few weeks each year.

Hookworm Infection

Hookworm infections were first seen in Florida in 1845 and Louisiana in 1850. This disease is thought to have been brought to Colonial America from the Eastern Hemisphere. It's caused by a tropical parasite found in the moist soils of the southwest, from Virginia to Illinois and down the Gulf of Mexico toward Texas. Slaves carried the disease, polluting the soil they worked by depositing parasitic eggs. As the eggs hatched, the parasite infected those near the soil where it lived.

Thiamine Deficiency (Beriberi)

Unlike some diseases, Thiamine deficiency, also called beriberi, can be treated and prevented. It's caused by not having enough vitamin B₁. The Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius first described it in 1642, naming it after the Sinhalese word meaning "weakness-weakness."

Beriberi appears in two forms: wet and dry. In the dry form, patients feel pain in their arms and legs, paresthesias (tingling or numbness), paralyses, and contractures (tightening of muscles). In its wet form, patients can have swelling of the arms, legs, and face, along with fluid buildup in their joints, lungs, and around the heart. The wet form of beriberi can lead to sudden death.

New England fishermen first found this disease in Colonial America in the 1800s. There are also reports that beriberi was seen in Jamestown, with people experiencing swelling, fluxes, and high fevers. Soldiers in the American Civil War also had similar symptoms.

Typhoid and Dysentery

Acute bacillary dysentery lasts for a shorter time than typhoid fever, but both cause bloody diarrhea. These two diseases are deadly on their own, but if a person has both at the same time, it's almost impossible to recover.

Typhoid Fever causes a long-lasting, burning fever. It is very weakening and often leads to death. It mostly happens in the hot months but can appear at any time. The first epidemic of typhoid fever in Virginia was reported by Reverend Robert Hunt after a voyage where the disease broke out. Typhoid Fever was a huge problem for military operations. Many soldiers would get sick, leading to a shortage of men. More men died from Typhoid Fever than from fighting or wounds.