(Medicine and Health)
The conditions of life in Colonial America - Health Issues
All was not well with the colonial settlers. People died very young from various ailments like influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, smallpox, malaria, rickets and a host of waterborne diseases. We can attribute this to the pressure on land, and the unhygienic conditions that were prevalent at that time. The average life expectance was only twenty five years and many did not survive their teen age. Unhygienic conditions were the prime cause, and the colonial cities and homes did not have a bathroom, running water or hygienic closets as of today. The people relieved themselves in pots and semi-open structures which caused the facial matter to somehow contaminate water. Added to this, the animals which were reared in close proximity contributed to further confounding the issue. Baths were a luxury that could be indulged in by a few. The squalor coupled with the unhygienic disposal of human and animal waste and the absence of any method of controlling the spread of epidemics took its toll regularly. (Medicine and Health) Those who could among the settlers asked for advice in medical issues from correspondents in England. Many tried the native medicines which included "herbs, minerals, and animal products. Home remedies for a variety of symptoms included ingredients such as snail water, opium, herbs, honey, wine, vipers, licorice, flowers, and berries. The alignment of the stars was believed to affect the healing properties of medicine." (Medicine and Health)
The sick person's best friend and medical adviser was the mother, grandmother, housekeeper or the friendly neighborhood mistress at the plantations who had a stock of herbs and concoctions and was the administrator of remedies. Nursing as a simple practice, like charity, began at home. The ladies administered the medicines and treated and nursed the sick. When they seem to fail they called in the barber, surgeon or the physician in that order perhaps considering expenses, which then bled the patients and did other acts of mercy. Midwives were popular in delivering babies and were more popular and respected perhaps more than the gynecologists of today, because the colonial homes had more births as compared to these days. Added to that they had no proper hospitals, and did not have the system of sterilizing equipments. Medicare was unheard of too.
The Development of Medical Science
The neo-colonial development of medical science begins with institutionalizing medicine and the birth of universities. The scientific temper that swept the world towards the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth which coincided with the birth of the new nation also saw the creation of scientific institutions that were more pragmatic and had a solution to the problems of the new society. Notable of these were the development of hospitals and instead of the sick being cared for by the home made nurses and town practitioners the hospitals provided better solutions, both for the patients and also in checking the progress of disease and infection to healthy individuals. (Kisacky, 38)
Isolation is itself a means of disease prevention. "Hospitals are and have been the institutions most integrally connected with the use of strategies of isolation for disease prevention, but even in hospitals what (or who) is and has been isolated, how that separation has been effected, and how it has been expected to affect specific disease incidence has changed drastically over time." (Kisacky, 38) Initially there was no such isolation but an attempt at relief. The hospitals were a matter of experiments in the beginning, and this resulted in a lot of theories that bad air spread infection. Malaria means bad air. However architects of hospitals made a discovery that serious cases need isolation. "After two years of considering various sites, in 1773 the New York Hospital's governors deliberately chose a site removed from the developed areas of the city, the equivalent of five blocks north of the...
Epidemics and Smallpox in Colonial America In 1992, the Smithsonian Museum held an exhibit on the process of exchanges between the Old World and the New World that resulted from the explorations of Christopher Columbus. The exhibit, entitled Seeds of Change, focused on five catalysts or "seeds" which had the most far-reaching consequences for both Europe and the new colonies in the Americas. These catalysts were the horse, sugar, the potato, corn
medicine, science and empire, with particular reference to malaria, the plague, and tuberculosis, in Great Britain, Africa and India, in the nineteenth century. The impact these diseases had on the imperial effort, and the medical profession, will also be discussed. The paper uses the following main texts: Colonizing the Body by David Arnold; Contagious Divides by Nayah Shan; Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness by Megan Vaughan;
3. The current emphasis on wellness as the overall goal of health care has placed considerable pressure on the health care educational system (Kreitzer, 2009). The wellness emphasis has caused the health care educational system to focus its attention on treating the entire patient and to provide the patient with the maximum amount of choice, quality, convenience, and personal care while maintaining affordability. This means that medical schools must begin
Public Passions In "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," Richard Wright provided a brief autobiographical sketch of his life growing up in the segregated South. He described how he learned about the laws of Jim Crow in the South, and the unwritten code of ethics or manners that all blacks should follow in the presence of whites. Fox example, some informal rules held that blacks must always address a white man
In colonial America, formal education for girls historically has been secondary to that for boys. In colonial America girls learned to read and write at dame schools. They could attend the master's schools for boys when there was room, usually during the summer when most of the boys were working. (Women's International Center) During the latter half of the Republic Era, rapid economic growth presented new opportunities for northern white women.
94). The modern legal definition of disease provides a useful starting point for an examination of the concept of disease and how it is regarded by various disciplines. According to Black's Law Dictionary (1990), disease is a "deviation from the healthy or normal condition of any of the functions or tissues of the body. An alternation in the state of the body or some of its organs, interrupting or disturbing
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