Colonial Medicine

Life in the colonial United States was one filled with hardship and
trial in which life spans were relatively short and the threat of an
incurable disease or food shortage weighed heavily on many minds.
Colonial medicine was rudimentary in the scarcity of resources and the
very few numbers of trained physicians which had come to the new land.
In fact, a colony’s women usually took over the community caregiver
position and helped with everything from child birth to herbal
treatments and natural remedies in a time of illness. Herbal
supplements and natural substances were the prevailing means of
treating illness in colonial medicine and have evolved into many of the
old wives tales we still hear. However, some of the very products we
use today contain the same active natural ingredient as used then, such
as calamine for burns or bites. Because of this utter lack of access to
medical care and the limited technology of the time, many diseases
which are quite curable today caused many deaths and as a result, life
spans were generally rather short.

Colonial medicine
faced an extra challenge in that the overall health of many of the
colonists tended to suffer from some of the extreme climate conditions,
poor sanitation and regular food shortages. Given the run down state
many colonists often found themselves in, the susceptibility for
contracting a certain disease could threaten the village as a whole.
Because of this, the introduction of a communicable disease such as
smallpox could cause an outbreak amongst the entire colony very
quickly. Such outbreaks were not uncommon and would claim many lives in
a short time due to the fact that antibiotics had not yet been
discovered at the time of colonial medicine.

Likewise,
at the time of the revolutionary war, many of the field medics
responsible for treating wounded soldiers were also untrained and used
non-sterile medical equipment, sometimes causing an infection, blood
poisoning, or death. Colonial medicine retained the same basic
understanding of the human body and disease as in Europe, but had to
utilize the naturally occurring substances around them to compensate
for lack of resources and access to medication.