1769 — Aug-Sep, Flux (Dysentery) and Fever Outbreak, esp. children, Boston, MA — ~108

—  180  Krawczynski. Daily Life in the Colonial City. 2013.

–~108  Blanchard estimate based on Duffy and subtracting expected deaths during two months.

 

Narrative Information

 

Duffy: “ ‘In the Months of August and September last,” reported a Boston newspaper in 1769, ‘an epidemical Fever and Flux prevailed among the young children in this Town: The Burials have been…in the whole 165 Whites, 14 Blacks.’[1] The severity of the outbreak is shown by the fact that the annual death rate in Boston only averaged around four hundred and twenty-five at this time.”[2] (Duffy. Epidemics in Colonial America. 1979, p. 220.)

 

Krawczynski: “1769…Dysentery outbreak in Boston kills 180 people.”[3]

 

Webster: “The dysentery was epidemic and fatal in 1769, (p. 257)

 

Sources

 

Duffy, John. Epidemics in Colonial America. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1953, reprinted 1979.

 

Krawczynski, Keith. Daily Life in the Colonial City. Santa Barbara, CO and Denver: Greenwood (An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC), 2013. Google preview accessed 1-8-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=E_QgVyPcmIAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Webster, Noah. A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases; with the principal phenomena of the physical world which precede and accompany them, and observations deduced from the facts stated (in two volumes). Hartford, CT: Hudson & Goodwin, 1799. Accessed 1-7-2018 at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N27531.0001.001/1:11?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Cites, in footnote 33, p. 220: Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post Boy and Advertiser, No. 634, October, 9, 1769.

[2] The monthly rate, based on an annual rate of 425, would be 35.4. Multiplied times 2 months = 70.8 (~71). Subtracting 71 (which could be expected) from 179 (actual), derives 108, the figure we use to give a sense of the mortality of this epidemic.

[3] Table 12.1. “Epidemics in the Cities.” This is the number of deaths reported in the press at the time, and noted in Duffy. We, however, subtract the number of deaths which would have been anticipated for a two-month period to derive our smaller number of ~108.