Dear all,
I've just received this reference from a journal most members might not
normally read. I haven't read it (yet) so I can't vouch for it. Hope someone
finds it useful.
Regards,
David Lambert
---
Social History of Medicine, Volume 12, Issue 1, pp. 45-7.
'The countrie continues sicklie': white mortality in Jamaica, 1655-1780
T Burnard
Department of History, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800,
Christchurch, New Zealand
The tropical regions of the New World in the early modern era offered
European migrants great wealth but were also demographically deadly. This
paper presents hard data on white mortality in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Jamaica and shows that white susceptibility to disease,
especially yellow fever, led to appalling white mortality. High white
mortality, especially in urban areas in the first half of the eighteenth
century, meant that Jamaica did not become a settler society full of
native-born whites, as occurred in plantation British North America. The
failure of white settlement and continuing high mortality accentuated
whites' penchant for fast living, for fatalism, and contributed to
slave-owners' callous disregard for the welfare of their slaves. White life
chances were not helped by inappropriate medical attention. Although
Jamaican doctors' explanations of high white mortality were occasionally
correct, their adherence to humoral and miasmic theories of medicine led
them to promote remedies that were at best ineffectual, at worst
detrimental. Contemporaries, however refused to accept the facts of white
demographic decline, in part because to do so would have been to deny the
possibility that Jamaica would become Anglicized rather than Africanized.
Key words: Jamaica, mortality, seasonality, yellow fever, British America,
colonial settlement, slavery, tropical health
------------------------------------------------------------
David Lambert,
Ph.D. Student,
Department of Geography,
Downing Place,
Cambridge, CB2 3EN.
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