Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916 (review)

The New England in the title of Alan C. Swedlund's study is for the most part Deerfield, Massachusetts, and environs, a locale Swedlund has been studying for forty years in his distinguished career as a demographic anthropologist with a historical bent. This study is somewhat different, however, in that it is an effort to reach beyond his "scientific background and positivist leanings" (p. 4) to explore how cultural history might "add to the detached orderliness" (p. 129) of a mainstream demographic approach. Death and mourning go to the heart of a culture's most profound wishes and fears, and his aim is to recover some of these by writing a history concerned with the "subjective, personal, and particular" (p. 167).

In this he is largely successful, although an illuminating analysis of how culture shaped people's subjective response to illness and death, not to mention loss more generally, waxes and wanes throughout the book. The study is organized for the most part around disease categories and the life cycle, so that the cultural framework of people's habits and values often seems secondary. Most of what we learn about illness and death in between 1840 and 1880 (the core decades of the study) will not surprise anyone familiar with these matters during this well-studied historical time. Infectious illness was rife, life expectancy at birth was low, medicine was various and largely ineffective, government was weak, and religion and community were the contexts in which families faced death and loss. Swedlund's research is deep and spans many different kinds of texts, from census reports to material objects. His chapters on childhood diseases and on tuberculosis make particularly good use of the range of sources, and add the heft of local detail to the broader perspectives of epidemiology and medical practice. Other chapters are less well formed, especially one in which discussions of pregnancy, men's industrializing labor, and the Civil War yield too many strands to be tied into a clear argument.

The people of Deerfield, like those of many New England towns, managed over time to preserve not only public records but also powerful personal texts—diaries and letters—that evoke the reality of losing a child to death or struggling to relieve the suffering of a spouse. Swedlund has come up with several fine diarists, and he includes generous swatches of text that make it possible to enter into the descriptive and imaginative worlds of his subjects. Presented with respect and care, the words of these women and men more often illustrate than drive the analysis. An exception to this is the final chapter, where Swedlund looks closely at certain practices surrounding death—cemetery art, memorial rituals, and the poignant desire of families to prepare bodies for burial and keep personal mementos close. Individuals we have met earlier in the book reappear and seem more fully at home in their beliefs than at any other point in the study. Children are throughout the book, and in this final chapter, on the last page, Swedlund observes of his work, "The one persistent theme I discovered was the genuine, heartfelt grief of a parent at the loss of a child" (p. 190). It suggests a theme that might have been used in a critical way to pull together into a cultural whole all that the book has to say about Deerfield and death.