Early Health Problems

Health in the colonies remained precarious, at best. Doctors were scarce, and they believed in bleeding patients for many illnesses. Anyone could dispense medicines, and diseases ran rampant. 

Bad teeth became one of the biggest problems. Today we know this can lead to all kinds of other health issues. Women often suffered more than men because of their child-bearing. In fact, many women also died trying to give birth.

Early on, typhoid fever and dysentery killed many, probably due to polluted water supplies. Malaria, often called swamp fever, might not always result in death, but it could be extremely debilitating. Smallpox resulted in a horrible death, and epidemics often occurred every 10 - 15 years. William Bradford wrote, 

"...the pox breaking and mattering and running into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flap off at once, as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And...they die like rotten sheep" (David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Colonial America. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988, p. 81).

Overall, people in the New England colonies seemed to have the best health. From the Chesapeake Bay

south had the worst. Yet, all of the colonies had it better than those in Europe because of more dense population and years of living in polluted conditions.

Although set in the early 1800's, health issues are problems in my historical novel, Cleared for Planting, now out. In Sown in Dark Soil,  which continues about the Moretz family and is the second book my publisher and I are working on, some of the characters from Cleared for Planting have died. Aren't you glad you live in a time of better health care?

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