History of medical practice in Illinois - Bushnell Historical Society

28 History of Medical Practice in Illinoisyou lay in burning heat, racked with pain in your head and along yourback, for an hour or so, when you began by degrees to feel less heat andpain, until your hands grew moist, and you were relieved by acopiousperspiration all over your body, and you got to your natural feelingagain." 6"You felt as though you had gone through some sort of collision, thrashing-machine,or jarring-machine, and came out not killed, but next thingto it," another description runs. "You felt weak, as though you had run toofar after something, and then didn't catch it. You felt languid, stupid andsore, and was down in the mouth and heel and partially raveled out. Yourback was out of fix, your head ached and your appetite crazy. Your eyeshad too much white in them, and your whole body and soul wereentirely woe-begone, disconsolate, sad, poor, and good for nothing. Youdidn't think too much of your-self and didn't believe that other peopledid, either; and you didn't care. You didn't quite make up your mind tocommit suicide, but sometimes wished some accident would happen toknock either the malady or yourself out of existence. You imagined thateven the dogs looked at you with a kind of self-complacency. You thoughtthe sun had a kind of sickly shine about it. About this time you came tothe conclusion that you would not accept the whole state of Indiana as agift; and if you had the strength and means, you picked up Hannah andthe baby, and your traps, and went back 'yander' to 'Old Virginny,' the'Jerseys,' Maryland or 'Pennsylvany.' " 7So harrowing was the ague that it gave rise to many of the tall tales inwhich frontier America delighted. More often than not the stories concernedthe sufferings of those who lived in the valley of the Illinois River—the worst place, by general repute, in the entire West. One settler thereshook all the teeth from his head; another could never keep a garmentwhole because his constant shaking unravelled it thread by thread untilit fell apart; the fits of a third became so frequent and so violent that hishouse fell down around him and he was buried in its ruins. 8In this paper I propose to sketch those aspects of the pioneer's environmentand habits of life that made the ague, and the other ailments withwhich he was afflicted, inevitable. First, however, we need to determinewhat we mean by the pioneer and the pioneer period.Obviously, the pioneer period was of uneven duration. In parts of Ohio,for example, it could be said to have lasted for a generation. In southernWisconsin, on the other hand, it was of half that length. Moreover, taking6A. D. P. Van Buren in Michigan Pioneer Collections, V (1882), 300-01.7Pickard and Buley, The Midwest Pioneer, 17.8J.S. Buckingham, The Eastern and Western States of America (London, 1842),II, 272-73.