A History of the Terrible Epidemic, Vulgarly Called the Throat Distemper, as It Occurred in His Majesty's New England Colonies Between 1735 and 1740 *

Almost as far back as written records go we find evidence that mankind has been afflicted by frequent recurrences of horrible epidemics. Periodically occurring without any apparent cause, each one has taken its toll of life and then departed as strangely as it came. They have halted social progress, determined the results of wars, and sometimes even threatened the existence of civilization itself. Nearly every age has witnessed some distressing disease in epidemic form. Leprosy and influenza were prevalent at the time of the Crusades and the Black Death of the Middle Ages is said to have destroyed one-fourth the population of the earth. The plague closed the theatres and retarded the full development of Elizabethan culture, and numerous other outbreaks followed down to the end of Stuart times. Smallpox and dysentery epidemics frequently occurred throughout the eighteenth century. Not so long ago, influenza spread rapidly around the world. We now fear the return of infantile paralysis. And so it goes. It has long been known that there was an epidemic of some disease in Kingston, New Hampshire, in 1735, but it is not so well known that this was merely a small part of a greater epidemic which involved most of the inhabited regions of New England and caused great loss of life wherever it appeared. To that generation of Americans it was a new disease and to them its behaviour was as strange as it was mortal. In some of the towns nearly half of all