Province of Affliction
Subtitle: Illness and the Making of Early New England
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9780226714424
Subjects: Public health
Description: "As the first Europeans settled in America, they found themselves often sick, weak, and likely to die. Here, Ben Mutschler explores how illness shaped society and government in New England from roughly 1690 through 1820. He focuses on the building blocks of society and government-family, household, town, colony-and their multifaceted engagements with the problems that diseases caused. Illness both defined and strained early American institutions, bringing people together in the face of calamity yet also driving them apart when the costs of persevering became too high or were too unequally shared"--