The province of affliction
illness and the making of early New England
Bände/Inhalt:
- Overviews. A tour of the province: October 18, 1769 ; Illness in the "social credit" and "money" economies of eighteenth-century New England -- Competency. Family competency: scenes from the life course of illness ; Household competency: work, responsibility, and belonging -- Dependency. Smallpox, public health, and town governance ; The domestic costs of war: wartime afflictions -- Agency. Colonial pensioners, the revolutionary invalid corps, and the advent of "decisive disability" ; State paupers and patients -- Epilogue
- "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"--