Historical accounts in assessing paleopathology of Native Americans • 113 



The 1 633-34 epidemic signaled the last of the large-scale, 

 acute disease episodes for New England Indians (see Table 

 2). While outbreaks of smallpox and other infections oc- 

 curred intemiittently in the years to follow, mortality levels 

 were much lower by necessity of the fact that substantially 

 fewer Indians remained. The question now arises, why did 

 introduced diseases decimate 25% , 50%, or sometimes even 

 95% of the Indians? Can this be attributed solely to genetic 

 susceptibility? 



I should now like to examine more closely the health care 

 systems of 17th century Native Americans and Europeans 

 respectively. 



New World and Old World technologies 



Native New England pharmacopoeia was quite adequate for 

 dealing with wounds, burns, snake bites, pulmonary ail- 

 ments, toothaches and body aches (Josselyn 1674), but vir- 

 tually no remedies existed for Old World pathogens such as 



lagrrb Paleopathology Symp. 1988 



SOURCES: Josselyn 1674, Krochmal and 

 Krochmal 1973, Tantaquidgeon 1925-26, 

 Thomson 1978, Vogel 1970. 



plague, smallpox, measles, yellow fever, or influenza. Table 

 3 lists a small sampling of remedies for common ailments 

 reportedly used in prc-Contact times. This is not to say that 

 the colonists possessed a vast knowledge or set of remedies 

 for such diseases. Even in the 20th century, we possess few 

 drugs for treating viral infections. The 17th century colonial 

 medical knowledge was so scant that John Winthrop was 

 impelled to write to London for instruction on treating com- 

 mon ills. The brief eight-page reply, which served as the 

 early colonists" principal source of medical knowledge, con- 

 tained potions and elixirs certainly of no greater sophistica- 

 tion than practices by the Indians. 



What the Europeans did possess was a familiarity with 

 various Old World viral and bacterial maladies and the 



