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Apropos of the below - some years ago I came across a guidebook to the West Indies, written circa 1860 as I recall. One section discussed the very short life expectancy of white planters in British Guiana, describing how it was usually attributed to yellow fever, malaria, and all manner of tropical diseases, both in letters to surviving family members back home and on tombstones - while the real cause was actually alcoholism. It outlined the typical Guaina planter breakfast - I forget the exact details, but it basically consisted of rum, port, beer etc. and next to no "food"! I wonder where the paper by Burnard got its "hard data" from - even today, records of causes of death can be notoriously inaccurate in many parts of the world, especially as far as socially stigmatising causes go (suicide, AIDS) so I expect that all manner of "sins" (alcoholism, syphilis?) were covered up in these 17th or 18th century Jamaican records. One might also contemplate the protective effects of some of these "sins" (alcohol, sexual availability of slaves, servants, prostitutes) being relatively unavailable to slaves, and the epidemiological consequences of these vectors of disease (together with drugs) being freely available to everybody in more recent times. Tony Glaser >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. > >________________________________________________________________________ >Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%