Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699

by Thomas Proctor Hughes

De la Warr, who blamed the distress of the colony upon the failures of the settlers, soon had another taste of the illnesses which so many of the colonists endured during their first months in the New World. In his report to the Company explaining his early departure from the colony, he included one of the fullest surviving accounts of sickness at Jamestown during the first few years of settlement:

That disease [the hot and violent ague] had not long left me, til (within three weekes after I had gotten a little strength) I began to be distempered with other greevous sicknesses, which successively and severally assailed me: for besides a relapse into the former disease, which with much more violence held me more than a moneth, and brought me to great weakenesse, the flux surprised me, and kept me many daies: then the crampe assaulted my weak body, with strong paines; and afterwards the gout (with which I had heeretofore beene sometime troubled) afflicted mee in such sort, that making my body through weakenesse unable to stirre, or to use any maner of exercies, drew upon me the disease called the scurvy; which though in others it be a sicknesse of slothfulnesse, yet was in me an effect of weaknesse, which never left me, till I was upon the point to leave the world.

When a person of strong constitution, living under the best conditions the colony could provide, and accompanied by a well-trained physician, found himself thus incapacitated, it is no wonder that the rank and file of the colony failed to pursue energetically by hard work and exemplary conduct their own best interests.

The firmness of De la Warr, who was much more indulgent of his own than of others' disorders, brought additional stability to the colony, but the attack of scurvy, which current opinion believed could be relieved only by the citrous fruits of the West Indies, caused him, accompanied by Dr. Bohun, to set sail from Virginia in the spring of 1611 for the same island of Nevis praised so highly for its baths by the first settlers of 1607. Disease had robbed the colony of another outstanding leader during a period when strong leadership on the scene was imperative.

Although the colony had experienced its worst years of hardship before De la Warr departed and the worst years in the New World had been caused by famine and disease, sickness and starvation were still to have a noteworthy effect. Disease no longer threatened the colony's life, but it shaped its history.

In 1624 the charter of the Company was annulled and, in explaining this major development, account must be taken of the cumulative effects of sickness and hunger upon the Company's fortunes; the first summer's seasoning and the Starving Time, for example, had long-term economic repercussions as well as short-term results in human suffering.

The Company had been in financial difficulties for some years and by 1624 the treasury was empty and the indebtedness heavy. If the mortality rate had not been so high and the level of energy of the colonists so reduced, the Company might have prospered. For example, local trade with the Indians necessitated small ships for the effective transportation of cargo, but several attempts by the Company to send to America boatwrights to construct such ships failed because of the deaths of the boatwrights. The Company had hoped in 1620 to better its financial condition by developing an iron industry in the colony, but this project suffered from the effects of disease, too, as the chief men for the iron works died during the ocean voyage. The remainder of the officers and men sent to establish the works died in Virginia either from disease or at the hands of the Indians. The high cost to the Company of the labor and services lost because of the early deaths of persons still indentured for a period of years cannot be estimated. Nor can the number of goals set by the colonists and the Company but never fulfilled because of sickness be tabulated. As late as 1623 a colonist wrote that "these slow supplies, which hardly rebuild every year the decays of the former, retain us only in a languishing state and curb us from the carrying of enterprise of moment."

In suggesting the part that famine and disease played in the annulment of the Company's charter, the effects of one more period of intense suffering must also be considered. In March, 1622, a bloody Indian massacre occurred in which more than 350 white men, women, and children died. Not only did the massacre cause a subsequent period of disease, famine, and death among the survivors, but the heavy casualties inflicted directly by the Indians can be explained, partially, by the weakened condition and depleted ranks of the colonists before the massacre.

So tenuous was the colony's ability to maintain an adequate and healthful living standard, that the destructive and disrupting impact of the massacre brought a period of severe famine and sickness. After the raid the surviving colonists had to abandon many of the outlying plantations with their arable fields, livestock, and supplies. And having had the routine of life interrupted, the settlers—their numbers unfortunately increased by a large supply of new immigrants, sent by ambitious planners in England—came to the winter of 1622-23 poorly provisioned.

Toward the end of this winter, famine reduced the settlers to such conditions that one wrote to his parents that he had often eaten more at home in a day than in Virginia in a week. The beggar in England without his limbs seemed fortunate to the Virginian who had to live day after day on a scant ration of peas, water-gruel, and a small portion of bread. Another wrote that the settlers died like rotten sheep and "full of maggots as he can hold. They rot above ground." As in 1609-10, inadequate diet weakened the body and made it easy prey to infection.