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Paper short abstract:

Thought inconsequential by the lack of surviving accounts, no single epidemic proved deadlier to colonial New England than the throat distempers. The combination of cultural and demographic research reveals the extinction of entire families, the very individuals who could have left those accounts.

Paper long abstract:

In 1735, a new disease seized the northeastern mainland of British North America. While the throat distempers never achieved the notoriety of other diseases of the colonial era, no single epidemic of the period proved deadlier to European settlers. By 1739 alone the death toll in New England had exceeded 5,000 individuals; 98% of the dead were children. Despite their extreme and stunningly skewed mortality, and their arrival amidst the Great Awakening, the throat distempers remain an understudied tragedy in American history.

The rare few demographers to remark upon this catastrophe in the last half-century have equated the lack of surviving accounts to a lack of emotional impact. The deaths of children, even in the vast numbers fallen to the throat distempers, simply did not matter enough to compel surviving parents to leave note. Consequently, historians of epidemics—even of those with extraordinarily high death counts like the throat distempers—continue to dismiss such events as unimportant. Combining traditional research methodologies with computational humanities technology, I reconstruct this catastrophic event anew. Rather than go on as one might expect if this event had no impact, surviving parents withdrew from their faith communities, ceased or delayed further reproduction, and oftentimes died within a few years of losing their children, leaving no surviving testimony of their grief. This challenges the dominate models of epidemic reconstruction and, furnishing a new way to explore loss in early North America, leaves a medical-historical analogue to the “lost voice” of the subaltern.