History of medicine in New Jersey : and of its medical men, from the settlement of the province to A.D. 1800 / by Stephen Wickes.

  • Wickes, Stephen, 1813-1889.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of medicine in New Jersey : and of its medical men, from the settlement of the province to A.D. 1800 / by Stephen Wickes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    but they told me that they had preserved them to a very great age. Bengston assured me that his father, at the age of seventy, cracked peach-stones and black walnuts with his teeth, notwithstanding their hardness, which at this time nobody dares to venture at that age. This confirms what I have before said, for at that time the “ use of tea was not known in North America.” One of the earliest pestilential diseases in America, of which we have any record, was the small pox, which wasted the Indians just before our ancestors landed at Plymouth. Some years after, in 1633, it was again fatal among the Indians, spreading from Narragansett to Piscataqua, and westward to the Connecticut river.^ The nomadic habits of this people was doubtless one of the causes of the spread of this disease. Upon the permanent settlement of West Jersey, in 1677, endeavors were made to excite the hostility of the natives against the English, by insinuations that the latter sold them the small pox in their match coats. The distemper was among them, and in a company who came together to consult about it and its origin, one of their chiefs said: “ In my grandfather’s time the small pox came, and now in my time the small pox has come.” Then stretching forth his hands towards the skies, said : “ It came from thence.” To this the rest assented.^ The Europeans were nevertheless the instrumental cause of the spread of small pox and the venereal disease among the native inhabitants of America.^ The Neiv York Gazette, ]2,ViV\-Bsy 18, 1732, notes; “The small pox spreads very much in this Province, and in New Jersey, also at Amboy, New Brunswick and there away. Many 1 Webster on Pestilence. * Smith's His. of N. J. 5 Rush’s Inquiries.