Individual, local, and familial accounts of sickness were widespread and important in early America. In my research, I’ve found journals, memoirs, and letters of these sickness stories. They are all shaped by Protestant teachings that pushed followers to understand illness and pain providentially. This was instilled not only in church, but also through stories shared among families and communities.
Early Americans had been trained in such personal accounts by the importance of conversion narratives, which they heard testified in church or read in popular books like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or James Janeway’s A Token for Children. Sickness narratives mapped onto the cadences of conversion narratives, with their emphases on repentance, faith, and salvation. In describing sickness, early Americans were to look back and reflect, to admit their failings and their frailties, and to turn with dependence to God.
Sickness accounts were published and distributed widely, especially when they were written by well-known religious leaders or mission communities. Frances Asbury, the Methodist itinerant minister often wrote of sickness in his journals, which were published in the Arminian Magazine beginning in 1789. In the German Pietist Lutheran community of Ebenezer, Georgia, the minister Johann Martin Boltzius wrote in detail about sickness in his family and the wider community from 1735 to 1753. His journals were published in Halle and Augsburg for a wide audience of coreligionists and financial supporters.
Early Americans actively responded to sickness and disease through narrative—seeking to find God’s providential power and mercy in their suffering. They worked out these narratives in their day-to-day encounters with illness, and they applied them to experiences of epidemic.