The diseases of the century did not allow for the inadequacies of the physician, and imparted a grim note of realism to the satire of the dramatist. Infant mortality was high and the life expectancy low. Hardly a household escaped the tragedy of death of the young and the robust; historians have sensed the influence omnipresent death had upon the attitudes and aspirations of the European and American of earlier centuries. School children today learn of such a dramatic killer as the bubonic plague, but even its terrible ravages do not dwarf the toll of ague (malaria), smallpox, typhoid and typhus, diphtheria, respiratory disorders, scurvy, beriberi, and flux (dysentery) in the colonial period.
England, and especially London with its surrounding marshes, suffered acutely with the ague during the century. Englishmen arriving in the New World were well aware of the dangers of this disease and made some effort to avoid the bad air, and the low and damp places. In 1658 the ague took such a toll that a contemporary described the whole island of Britain as a monstrous public hospital. Unfortunately, Thomas Sydenham, whose prestige in England was great and whose works on fevers were influential, paid scant tribute to cinchona bark (quinine) which was known but thought of, even by Sydenham, as only an alleged curative offering too radical a challenge to current techniques. According to humoral doctrine, fever demanded a purging, not the intake of additional substances.
Unfortunately, public hygiene and sanitation enlisted few adherents. Epidemics of the seventeenth century have been judged the most severe in history. In Italy physicians ahead of their times proposed the draining of marshes and pools of stagnant water, and recommended the isolation of persons with contagious diseases. But it was the great London fire of 1666 that rid that city of its infested and infected places, not an enlightened municipality.
Therefore Virginia, a colony of seventeenth-century Europe, started life burdened with a heritage of deadly and widespread disease and inadequate medicine. Not only did the ships that brought the settlers to Jamestown Island bring surgeons and medical supplies but also medical problems frequently more serious than the men and supplies could cope with.
The European or Englishman, however, did not originate the practice of medicine in Virginia for the Indian had had to struggle with the problems of disease and injury long before the seventeenth century.
Indians and Their Medicine
Seventeenth-century Americans found the medical practices of the Indians interesting enough to include descriptions of them in their accounts of the New World. The attitude of the authors of these early observations is a mixture of curiosity, wonder, and—on occasion—admiration.
Henry Spelman, one of the early colonists, wrote of Jamestown and Virginia as they were in 1609 and 1610. He described the manner of visiting with the sick among the Indians. According to Spelman, the "preest" laid the sick Indian upon a mat and, sitting down beside him, placed a bowl of water and a rattle between them. Taking the water into his mouth and spraying it over the Indian, the priest then began to beat his chest and make noises with the rattle. Rising, he shook the rattle over all of his patient's body, rubbed the distressed parts with his hands, and then sprinkled water over him again.
Like the colonist, the Indian tried to draw out blood or other matter from the sick or wounded person. The method often used for releasing the ill humor from a painful joint or limb must have caused considerable suffering but may have offered certain advantages in preventing fatal infection. If the affected part could bear it, the Indian thrust a smoldering pointed stick deep into the sore place and kept it there until the excess matter could drain off. Another technique for burning and opening had a small cone of slowly burning wood inserted in the distressed place, "letting it burn out upon the part, which makes a running sore effectually."
Still another method for treating a wound was for the priest to gash open the wound with a small bit of flint, suck the blood and other matter from it, and finally apply to it the powder of a root. A colonist in describing the practice wrote that "they have many professed phisitions, who with their charmes and rattels, with an infernall rowt of words and actions, will seeme to sucke their inwarde griefe from their navels or their grieved places." Judging by other accounts written during the century concerning Indian medicine, the powdered root may well have been sassafras, of which there was an abundance in the Jamestown area. The priest dried the root in the embers of a fire, scraped off the outer bark, powdered it, and bound the wound after applying the powder.