1676 — Aug-Sep, Bloody Flux (Dysentery) Mass. Bay Colony, especially Boston, MA — 50

–50  Aug. Increase Mather, cited in Caulfield, “Some Common Diseases of Colonial…,” p. 46.[1]

 

Narrative Information

 

Bielawa: “After discharging his cargo in Boston, skipper Howe,[2] the crew and…two passengers — Augur and Jones — set out for the return trip to Connecticut on September 10, 1676. Contrary winds proved too much for the vessel and the ketch was forced back into the harbor. Tragically for Ephraim and all of Boston’s citizens, the settlement at the time was wrestling with the shroud and sickle of the ‘bloody flux.’ This was the seventeenth-century appellation applied to the water and food-borne disease we now recognize as dysentery. Boston’s epidemic of 1676 saw many dying from the ‘grippings, vomiting, and flux and fever’ of this illness.” (no page numbers)

 

Caulfield: “Increase Mather, writing of the 1676 epidemic of ‘fever & fluxes (especially in Boston),’ said that fifty persons died during August, eleven of them within two days…” (Caulfield, Ernest. “Some Common Diseases of Colonial Children.” Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol. 35, April 1942, p. 46.)

 

Source

 

Bielawa, Michael J. Wicked New Haven. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013. Google preview accessed 1-28-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=EKd2CQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Caulfield, Ernest. “Some Common Diseases of Colonial Children.” Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol. 35, April 1942, pp. 4-65. Accessed 1-17-2018 at: https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/865

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Was still going in September, as evidenced by Bielawa, but we have no numbers.

[2] Ephraim Howe.