History of medical practice in Illinois - Bushnell Historical Society

The Hardy Pioneer 27ments, and that the malarial exception was much more important than anunwary reader might assume from this statement.There are no statistics available, but contemporary evidence establishesthe prevalence of illness beyond question. Thus James Flint, an Englishmantraveling in the Ohio Valley, reported from Louisville in the fall of1820 that one-third of the inhabitants of Vincennes were confined to theirbeds, and that the same was true of the Wabash country on both sides ofthe river. 3In its issue of December 19, 1820, the Edxuardsville Spectator (Illinois)apologized for bringing out only a half sheet on the ground that its staffhad been disabled by the influenza. Around Indianapolis, in the summerand fall of 1821, fevers of one kind and another were so prevalent that itwas estimated that an eighth of the population had died. Six months laterthe Indianapolis Gazette asserted that 900 of the1000 inhabitants of thetown either were or had been sick. In the fall of 1823 Ohio newspapersreported diat more than half of the 165,000 people who lived within fiftymiles of Columbus were ill. The Asiatic cholera, brought to the West 4 in1832 by regular army troops sent out to participate in the Black Hawk War,took hundreds if not thousands of lives during the next three years. Themilk sickness claimed many a victim in addition to Nancy Hanks Lincoln.Pneumonia, typhoid, erysipelas, and other ailments kept the pioneercompany wherever he went. 5No disease, however, approached the fever and ague in universality. Socertain was its incidence, so prevalent its ravages, that the early settlersoon came to consider it a concomitant of the frontier, and dismissed itwith the grimly nonchalant remark, "He ain't sick, he's only got the ager."But the shaking wretch who was in the grip of the disease was sick, andknew it. As one old pioneer put it, the chills crept over your system instreaks, "faster and faster, and grew colder and colder as in successiveundulations they coursed down your back, till you felt like 'a harp of athousand strings', played upon by the icy fingers of old Hiems (Hermes?)who increased the cold chills until his victim shook like an aspen leaf, andhis teeth chattered in his jaws. There you laid shaking in the frigid agueregion for an hour or so until you gradually stole back to a temperate zone.Then commenced the warm flashes over your system, which increased withheat as the former did with cold until you reached the torrid region, where'Letters from America, in Reuben Gold Th wakes, Early Western Travels (Cleveland,1904), IX, 287.* Here and throughout this paper this term is given the meaning it had one hundredand more years ago: that is, as being rougbly synonomous with the present Middle West.6This paragraph is based upon the comprehensive, well documented summary to befound in Madge E. Pickard and R. Carlyle Buley, The Midwest Pioneer: His Ills, Cures,& Doctors (New York, 1946, 11-27.)