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  • The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land
  • Steven Stowe
Conevery Bolton Valenčius . The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. Reprint. New York: Basic Books, 2004. viii + 388 pp. Ill. $17.95 (paperbound, 0-465-08987-9).

Moving into lands west of the Appalachians, nineteenth-century Americans were eager to assess "the health of the country," by which they meant a number of things: the quality of its soil, its prospects for commerce, its social environment, and, not least, its general healthiness as a place where air and water promoted the physical vigor necessary for prosperity. The phrase makes an apt title for Conevery Bolton Valenčius's ambitious study of how Americans in the trans-Appalachian West experienced settling a new place. On top of the more familiar social and economic adjustments, Valenčius argues, was a subtler relation to "new" land that implicated Americans' bodies and perceptions in ways that both enticed and unnerved them.

Through an imaginative reading of travelers' accounts, settlers' journals and memoirs, physicians' "geographical" reports, periodicals, and other literature that documented the westward push of the United States' adolescent empire, Valenčius reconstructs settlers' sense of the sheer physicality of testing a new country, at the same time that they tested themselves. Air, soil, water, and the act of cultivation were material facts, to be sure, but ones also filled with natural omens for the well-being of body and mind. Indeed, throughout her study Valenčius persuasively [End Page 775] shows the value of focusing on people's abiding sense of their bodies as inextricable from, yet vulnerable to, the "influence" of air and water in a given place. These elements, along with vegetation, the lay of the land, and wildlife, bore directly on people's grasp of physical health and its preservation. The soil, too, Americans experienced as a kind of body akin to their own—one to be "broken," then reshaped and made fruitful. Refreshingly, Valenčius recovers what is best termed the primitive intensity of Americans' reflexive link between their bodies and the environment, without condescending to them; this is a world we have lost, not a lesser world.

Physicians were central actors in this drama of body, novelty, and will. As one of many varieties of healers, of course, M.D.'s helped mediate—and medicate—Americans' physical encounter with new environments. Drugs and other remedies flowed in the "opened" land almost as freely as the rivers. Physicians also inscribed the land in their numerous published "geographies" or "medical topographies"—essays on the material, scientific, and social qualities inherent to a new place. Valenčius offers a complex and convincing look at how physicians wrote both as scientists and as wholly "local" men. In one of her best chapters, she shows how doctors and other observers were fascinated by the westward movement's implications for race. Far from being a settled matter, race was among the fluid attributes of nature, with its social and medical meanings up for grabs as much as any new commodity in the West.

A book so alive with suggestion and its own considerable intensity has its flaws, of course. Change over time is difficult to assess in the cultural, almost mythic, approach to the past that Valenčius adopts. Yet some assessment of how Americans' experience changed over the course of the century would have added dimension and sharpness to her interpretation. Too, while she has a good ear for settlers' words and expressions, she sometimes piles trope upon trope of her own invention so that when we arrive at the interpretive place she has taken us to we arrive with less supportive evidence than feels comfortable. And while no one book can do it all, it is strange that so well-read an author has so little to say about another fundamental language employed by nineteenth-century Americans to embrace their hopes and anxieties: the language of religious devotion and faith. Spirituality anchored the transient body for many Americans whose physical worries and triumphs were, literally, unthinkable without reference to unseen benevolence. Even with its shortcomings, though, this innovative...

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