In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Microbes and a "Magic Box":Medicine and Disease in Early American Studies
  • Kelly Wisecup (bio)
Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. James H. Sweet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 300 pp.
Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest, and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century. Pratik Chakrabarti. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. 259 pp.
Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative. Cristobal Silva. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 244 pp.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning study, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond asks his readers to consider the transmission of European diseases to the Americas "from the microbes' point of view" (198). He imagines the various methods by which germs spread: they wait passively to be passed on by an unknowing host, they change their habits to accelerate their transmission, and they even induce people to transfer them with coughs or sneezes. As Diamond explains, what we consider "symptoms" represent for germs a brilliant strategy for survival (198). From the microbe's perspective, the epidemics that devastated Native American populations and consequently enabled Hernán Cortés's conquest of Tenochtitlan and English settlement at Plymouth were repercussions [End Page 199] of a biological fight for survival in which microbes found Native Americans to be ideal hosts. Diamond employs this approach to counter views that see Europeans' colonization of the Americas as a consequence of biological differences that endowed Europeans with superior bodies and civilizations. Instead, Diamond argues that Europeans developed immunities to diseases such as smallpox as a result of trans-European trade and contact with livestock, while Native Americans' isolation from such trading routes and the absence of domesticated animals left them susceptible to opportunistic microbes.1

In 1887, Ottawa Andrew J. Blackbird also represented the origins of a smallpox epidemic, but he told a different story of disease. Blackbird explained that the epidemic originated in the 1750s in Montreal, where the "small pox was sold to them shut up in a tin box," which was promised to contain something that would "do them great good" and which the Ottawas were not to open until they returned home (9). Upon unfastening the box, they found a series of smaller boxes, which they opened until, as Blackbird writes:

they came to a very small box, which was not more than an inch long; and when they opened the last one they found nothing but mouldy particles in this last little box! They wondered very much what it was, and a great many closely inspected to try to find out what it meant. But alas, alas! pretty soon burst out a terrible sickness among them. The great Indian doctors themselves were taken sick and died. The tradition says it was indeed awful and terrible. Every one taken with it was sure to die. Lodge after lodge was totally vacated—nothing but the dead bodies lying here and there in their lodges—entire families being swept off with the ravages of this terrible disease.

(9-10)

Blackbird's narrative of the "magic box" (Jaskoski 143) containing "mouldy particles" provides an alternative to Diamond's account of microbes, hosts, and evolutionary processes (Blackbird 9). While Diamond focuses on exposure and immunity to European diseases to explain colonial epidemics, Blackbird emphasizes the curiosity, deception, and terror that characterized colonial exchanges of illness. Smallpox is one of the gifts of colonization in Blackbird's account, and he exposes the devastating value of this gift by representing the deaths even of the "great Indian doctors" and scenes of dead bodies (9). In Diamond's history, the culprits of colonial [End Page 200] epidemics are microbes that act with an evolutionary desire to reproduce and to survive. Conversely, Blackbird highlights the material contexts and human costs of colonial encounters, and he presents a direct connection between disease and encounters between European colonists and Native Americans.

These two stories, one from a microbe's perspective and one from an Ottawa Indian's point of view, parallel two approaches to colonial epidemics characterizing early American literary and historical studies. In the first, which can be aligned with Diamond's focus on laws of evolution and...

pdf