Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures

Notes

207 notes Introduction 1. Samson Occom, “Account of the Montauk Indians, on Long Island (1761),” in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in EighteenthCentury America, ed. Joanna Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. On Native American religious and medical knowledge and its similarities to colonial knowledge, see Dane Morrison, A Praying People: Massachusett Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600–1690 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 224; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 30. For the same subject in an African context, see James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. xv. 5. Ontheclassicalconnectionsbetweenmedicineandpoetry,seeRaymondA.Anselment, The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), esp. introduction and chap. 1. 6. See Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 7. David D. Hall makes a similar point regarding religion when he writes, “The people of seventeenth-century New England lived in an enchanted universe.” Colonists believed they lived in a world of wonders, in which supernatural forces were responsible for events and in which ritual, prayer, and dreams could provide insight into the meaning of 208 Notes to Pages 3–7 unusual phenomenon. See Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 71 and chap. 2. 8. See Patricia A. Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). 9. See James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane (London, 1764); Alexander Hamilton, “Itinerarium ,” in Colonial American Travel Narratives, ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Penguin, 1994), 173–327; Hamilton, The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and James Kirkpatrick, The Sea-Piece; A Narrative, Philosophical and Descriptive Poem. In Five Cantos (London, 1750). 10. See, for example, David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); William Spengemann, A New World of Words: Redefining Early American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 11. Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), esp. chaps. 2 and 4. The question of where syphilis originated has been a matter of debate since the fifteenth century. For just a few references on this matter, see Brenda J. Baker and George J. Armelagos, “The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis: Paleopatholgical Diagnoses and Interpretation,” in vol. 26 of Biological Consequences of the European Expansion, 1450–1800, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple and Stephen V. Beck (Variorum: Ashgate, 1997), 1–35; and Amy G. Carmichael, “Syphilis and the Columbian Exchange: Was the New Disease Really New?,” in The Great Maritime Discoveries and World Health, ed. Mario Gomes Marques and John Clue (Lisbon: Escola Nacional de Saude Publica Ordem Dos Medicos Instituto De Sintra, 1991), 187–200. 12. Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the AngloAmerican Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 160. 13. Ibid., 27. 14. Ibid., 28. 15. Cristobal Silva, Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11. 16. Ibid., 32. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. Ibid., 59. 19. Ibid., 57. 20. Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America...