“A Scene of Diseases”

Peter McCandless

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511977428.009

3 - “A Scene of Diseases”

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011

Peter McCandless

Show author details

Peter McCandless: Affiliation:
College of Charleston, South Carolina

Book contents

Get access

Summary

At Midnight when the Fever rag'd

By Physick Art still unasswag'd,

And tortur'd me with Pain:

When most it scorch'd my aching Head,

Like sulph'rous Fire, or liquid Lead,

And hiss'd through every Vein.

South Carolina Gazette, July 28, 1732

I was ill with fever in Purrysburg about three months and afterwards in Georgia at Savannah … I had the bloody flux for six months. Also a great swelling befell me. My whole belly was swollen so that I might have burst.

Samuel Dyssli, 1737

I am heartily tired of Carolina and dread the approach of summer which I am afraid will renew my intermittent complaint, from which I have never been thoroughly free since August last.

John Murray of Murraywhat, 1763

“A COMPLICATION OF DISORDERS”

In 1711, Gideon Johnston, Anglican Commissary in Charleston, described his body as “a scene of diseases.” The phrase could have been a metaphor for the lowcountry, for it encapsulated the experience of much of the population. Another Anglican missionary aptly summed up the situation when he wrote that he had endured “a complication of disorders.” Many people suffered almost continually from one disease or another, sometimes several at once. It is not always possible to determine what people suffered or died from in particular cases, but we can identify the major culprits. The most visible suffering was that caused by deadly epidemics, mainly smallpox and yellow fever but also other epidemics from time to time. Such “malignant” epidemics were part of the public sphere: Official documents and newspapers (after 1731) often discussed them, at least once they could no longer be denied to exist. Harder to detect in public sources are the endemic disorders that claimed numerous victims every year.

Type: Chapter
Information: Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry , pp. 39 - 60

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511977428.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Chalmers, Lionel, An Account of the Weather and Diseases of South-Carolina 2 vols. (London, 1776) 1: 66, 2: 10, 21–55, 65Google Scholar

Milligen-Johnston, George, A Short Description of the Province of South Carolina (London, 1770), 43Google Scholar

Duffy, John, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953), 125–134, 180–181, 189–193, 214–222Google Scholar

Reiss, Oscar, Medicine in Colonial America (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 330Google Scholar

Miranda, Francisco, The New Democracy in America, 1783–1784, trans. by Judson P. Wood and ed. by John S. Ezell (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 33Google Scholar

Humphreys, Margaret, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 28Google Scholar

Gilles, Herbert M. and Warell, David A., Bruce-Chwatt's Essential Malariology, 3d edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 36–49Google Scholar

Packard, Randall M., The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar

Dobson, Mary, “Mortality Gradients and Disease Exchanges: Comparisons from Old England and Colonial America,” Social History of Medicine 2 (1989) 261–272, 280CrossRef Google Scholar PubMed

Childs, Julien Ravenel, Malaria and Colonization in the Carolina Low Country, 1526–1696 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), 125–127Google Scholar

Duncan, Kirsty, “The Possible Influence of Climate on Historical Outbreaks of Malaria in Scotland,” Proceedings of the Royal College of Physician of Edinburgh 23 (1993) 55–62Google Scholar PubMed

Kukla, Jon, “Kentish Agues and American Distempers: The Transmission of Malaria from England to Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” Southern Studies 25 (1986): 135–147Google Scholar PubMed

Cates, Gerald, ‘“The Seasoning’: Disease and Death Among the First Colonists of Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 64 (1980): 146–158Google Scholar

Dubisch, Jill, “Low Country Fevers: Cultural Adaptations to Malaria in Antebellum South Carolina,” Social Science Medicine 21 (1985): 642CrossRef Google Scholar PubMed

Coclanis, Peter, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 41Google Scholar

Patterson, K. David, “Disease Environments of the Antebellum South,” in Ronald Numbers and Todd Savitt, eds., Science and Medicine in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 160Google Scholar

Wood, Peter, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 87Google Scholar

The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library; American Colonial Section Calendar and Indexes, compiled by Manross, William W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), nos. 204–205; The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg 3 vols. (Philadelphia: The Muhlenberg Press, 1945), 3: 566; “Charleston in 1774 as Described by an English Traveler,” SCHM 47 (1945), 180

Michaux, Francois Andre, Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains (London, 1805)Google Scholar

Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed., Travels West of the Alleghanies (Cleveland, 1904), 296

Watson, Elkanah, Men and Times of the Revolution; or Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, ed. by Watson, Winslow C. (New York, 1856), 56Google Scholar

Mylne, William, Travels in the Colonies, 1773–1775, ed. Ted Ruddock (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993) 44–45Google Scholar

Hooker, Richard J., ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 4–9, 84–87, 191–192, 200–201Google Scholar

McMillin, James A., The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 1–5, 52Google Scholar

Rawley, James A., The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: Norton, 1981)Google Scholar

The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, ed. by Inikori, Joseph E. and Engerman, Stanley L. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992)CrossRef

Klein, Herbert, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar

Morgan, Philip D., Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 445Google Scholar

Littlefield, Daniel, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 28Google Scholar

Bonomi, Patricia U., Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31–32Google Scholar

Wood, Bradford J., “‘A Constant Attendance on God's Alter’: Death, Disease, and the Anglican Church in Colonial South Carolina, 1706–1750,” SCHM 100 (1999), 204–220Google Scholar

Edgar, Walter, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 181–183, 293Google Scholar

Edwards, George N., A History of the Independent or Congregational Church of Charleston, South Carolina (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1947), 8–13, 21–29, 152, 157Google Scholar

Howe, George, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina (Columbia, 1870), 372–373Google Scholar

Tortora, Daniel J., SCHM 107 (2006), 273–306, 108 (2007), 32–100

Coclanis, , “Death in Early Charleston: an estimate of the crude death rate for the white population of Charleston, 1722–1732,” SCHM 85 (1984), 280–291Google Scholar

Waterhouse, Richard, A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670–1770 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989), 105–106Google Scholar

Burnard, Trevor, “‘The Country Continues Sicklie’: White Mortality in Jamaica, 1655–1780,” Social History of Medicine 12 (1999), 45–72CrossRef Google Scholar

Book contents

3 - “A Scene of Diseases”

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive