Focus 580; The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land

We now tend to think I think that the idea that there's a relationship between our health and the environment we tend to think that that is a pretty modern idea. Now we have an understanding of things like germs and pollution but the fact of the matter is that this is not necessarily a new idea that for example people in the 19th century although they didn't know but germs and they might not have had the kind of understanding we have of why people get sick they did indeed think a lot about the relationship between their health and the place they lived. And that is what we'll be talking about here this morning in this part a focus 580 our guest for the program is con a very Valencia's. She is an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She's an historian of the 19th century and is the author of the book the health of the country and the subtitle is How American settlers understood themselves and their land. It's published by Basic Books and it indeed looks at the period in the United States before the Civil War and the period of westward expansion. And this very issue

of people and how they thought about this relationship between health and geography. This in fact this book is based on her doctoral thesis. She got her Ph.D. from Harvard. That thesis one of the Allan Nevins prize from the Society of American historians for the best written dissertation on American history. She's joining us this morning by telephone and we certainly welcome questions people want to join the conversation asking only that people try to be brief so we can keep things moving along. Any ones though welcome to call here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 and toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Professor Valencia. Hello. Good morning. Thanks very much for talking with us. My pleasure. So it seems that this is the issue of geography of health or environmental health and those connections that's been something you've been interested in for a lot of your academic career I guess. Right and it's something that I think increasingly many Americans are interested in in our own personal

lives. So it was fascinating to me to find in the records of 19th century people which I think many of us tend to think of as kind of old and musty and dusty and not having much relevance to our lives very similar kinds of concerns with the ways in which their physical surroundings would affect them. I think it's interesting that obviously was something that you noticed that you know how much of these sort of writings and these were not scholarly writings these are writings of a regular folks as they talked about where they were going where they traveled where they wanted to live trying to pick a good place that they so often talked about places as being healthy that they would say I found this place and I want to settle there. And I think it'll be a great place to live with my family and I think it's a healthy place. That's right that's exactly the language. And what was interesting to me is that they wouldn't say not they would say not only I will be healthy they are or my family will enjoy good health there. But there are. It's a healthy place or they would say I don't want to go there because it's the

sickly Valley or an inn Simbu various climate and what was interesting to me was to try to get at what was it that that gave these qualities of health to places not simply to people to animate human beings but to surroundings. And what I was what I found in going through lots of writings from the 19th century was that 19th century folks understood the surrounding world to operate in inter of intelligible ways that the world around them wasn't so separate from them that the same kinds of properties of balance of forces and balances and you know balance is a good thing and a balance between flowing movement makes you healthy and when things get out of whack and out of equilibrium that makes something sickly. And that was true in terrain just as they understood it. They they thought that was true in their own self. Well that's I think that that's what is fascinating. And and I hesitate to use the word charming but that's part I think that is part of it that

the idea that for them they their understanding of their own bodies and how they worked those provided metaphors that they used as they talked about and tried to understand the landscape. And the earth and how it worked. And you know it was fascinating to me was that this is a profoundly agricultural world. So I think it's not it's not even that people necessarily look to their physical selves and look outward. But I think you know these are folks people living in slavery people who are free but who also were farming and taking care of chickens and cows and ducks and mules and working on land most of the time that that they lived in and among the earth the soil breezes trees different kinds of flowing waters you know flooding waters or droughts periods of drought and that the outside world that I think many of us you know that attempt to control many of us are probably sitting in air conditioned

containers of rooms right now that I think we've lost some of that sense in which the physical world would be so much a part of yourself that you wouldn't make a categorical distinction with how you know understand that versus your own body and something a thinker also looking. The book and the experiences of people I think it serves as a reminder of what a difficult undertaking this was where people were moving into into environments and ecosystems that were very unfamiliar to them. It wasn't like what they were used to where they grew up and where making the right choice of the place to live of could literally make the difference between success and failure and maybe even between living and dying. Absolutely. Absolutely I mean these were vital choices. One Irish immigrant whom I quote in the book in 1819 is looking at a piece of land and he says will in the course of this season go out to enter three hundred twenty acres of land that is to the book to purchase it in some healthy place where there is good land.

So what he is saying is writing to his brother back in Ireland right then is I'm going to find some place where not only I can make a good fight I can farm well and I can make a good start for my family and probably for his extended family because immigrants frequently brought over brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles once they got established. But where he would also find help. And that was a crucial choice for 19th century people where they found the sickly land. They did their best to avoid it if they were slave owners. They might put their own family up on their own higher ground and then send their slaves to work in the more sickly bottomland they did everything they could to men too. Take themselves into the zones that they felt to have positive environmental effects on their health and to keep themselves away from sickly places. And again going back I guess I'm thinking of the same track about how difficult and challenging this was. It was interesting to read here that for people who did who did make this make this remove you know they they moved themselves from places they knew to these

new places try to make new homes it seemed that that just about the first thing that happened to them was they got sick. Absolutely. I mean I think that's one crucial difference between our experience and that of the 19th century and many areas before them as well was that when you moved particularly from the people of this era it was particularly crucial if you moved latitudes. But if you went from someplace of shorter days to longer days or. In some places it was cooler to someplace hotter. You would get sick and indeed their experience would bear this out in part because of the prevalence of malaria up and down the Mississippi valley in this period. So most folks who moved to the mid part of this country would get what they called the shakes that get the egg you with another word for it. And that was these terrifying and often fatal and almost always debilitating periods of fever and alternating with incredible chill. So it was not only that you were sick but also that you would get feverish Lee delirious and be taken out of yourself in the way that you are with a

fever and that you also would be kind of dramatically out of kilter with the world. I mean it would be late August and you would be so cold that you'd be your relatives would be piling blankets on you and building roaring fires to try to keep you warm. And then all the sudden you go back up into a high fever that was terrifying and disorienting to people. That's what that. It's malaria. It killed a lot of people. It took away the strength of many other workers but that was the main introduction that many people had to the new country that many of them came to try to conquer to try to take over to try to claim for themselves and make a new life in it would seem that it was a it was almost a sort of a test a winnowing of who is going to who is strong enough to make it and who wouldn't. You know what. Everything is I expected to find that reading 19th century literature and I didn't really find that kind of imagery so much. You know what I found was more that people even even some of the people who had the most sort of bold and conquering language about what they were doing they expected

that going to a new place would fundamentally change them. So there's almost a kind of humility in that approach that that they it's not will I be strong enough but I will be transformed. I will be remade. It's what they call this process acclamation that you would be acclimated to your new place. And we would find some medical explanation for this primarily in terms of a body's adjustment to malaria. I mean that is once you've had malaria you can come to a kind of. More or less an equilibrium with the malarial parasite in which you're not ferociously ill. Then again you're not completely healthy either. But you no longer have those oscillations between fever and cold but nineteenth century people didn't expect to be unchanged when they did something as important as moving west and they weren't thinking of this a just an as a as a as sense as a metaphor they weren't thinking of it in psychological spiritual terms they were thinking that in literal physical terms.

Well you know one of the great things about 19th century writings is they were doing all of those at once. Not that too early for psychology is a self-conscious sense but this also very much has a spiritual dimension. I mean people talked about the what they called the crisis of illness and the crisis of the soul. You know in a moment of salvation or of recognizing God's glory these are very closely related and indeed you know people who got very ill and felt himself to be close to death often had spiritual experiences. So in that sense it's now. Not that they felt it was only physical but these changes were physical they could be spiritual. They had to do with one's relationship to one's family because remember that a lot of folks moving west particularly those in slavery but also free people might never see the family they left behind. So this is the kind of meaning of going to a new country operated in many many different levels simultaneously. Our guest this morning cut a very Valencia's. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. She's an historian of the 19th century she grew up in Little Rock who or was a native of Little

Rock Arkansas. And she's the author of the book the health of the country which looks at how in 1903 Americans those who were moving west who were settling there how it is they thought about the relationship between their health and well-being and the place where they lived. Published by Basic Books and questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 I guess. We we really haven't. I should ask you to talk about we really haven't talked about and that is you made the point that people in a very literal way talk about healthy places and unhealthy places and what they were looking for when they were thinking about where they'd like to build a home and farm and raise their families. They were looking for healthy places so people of this time as they were thinking about this. What what made a healthy place why is that some places where healthy and some places were unhealthy.

So a perfectly healthy place and in the language of this era would be some place that had that was slightly elevated. They got good sunshine but wasn't too baking hot. That got nice pleasant breezes but not not roaring gales. Some place that was near a water source but not near stagnant water and where there were trees and vegetation nearby but but not too thick not now not too rank not not too dense forests nearby so some place sort of park like on the side of a sort of a low hill would be ideal. Now you can imagine that folks moving into Mississippi Valley for instance found very few places that match that idealized conception. Instead what they found very frequently was incredibly fertile land that was also in their understanding extremely sickly or in their language in the saloon Briest. And it was sickly because it was low land because it was a land that was often overrun by floods. Remember this is before the Corps of Engineers has controlled the American Waterways. So this is when people

would experience flooding and beaver dams that would back up small creeks on a regular basis and so on and the land that often had still been stagnant water and that kind of water would often produce what the 19th century people understood as miasma and miasma as a fascinating concept because it's kind of a. It's a catch all in the same way that I think germs are for us. That is a miasma is something that it's like a fog or a smoke. It involves a bad smell. It's sort of gross yuckiness that is produced by rotting things by swamp land by stagnant water and any place that produces miasma will cause illness to human beings. Now the problem was that good land was often bottomland was often landed right near rivers and in river valleys and those areas were in 19th century terms highly Mia's matic. So there was always a kind of bargain you know go to this place get a couple crops out then maybe will move to someplace more healthy

or. Or what people often did was try to move someplace thickly and drain it clear it move away some of the vegetation burn it down convert wild land into the settlement ordered countryside and therefore this is the radical way in which 19th century people understood their own role with respect to the environment and by doing those things they could produce more healthy land that they could actually transform the health of their environments. They thought by making them into domesticated landscape. So it seems pretty obvious that thinking listening to that description of sickly land and Y and and listening. What they thought with the problem the seems the obvious explanation invites as well. We also know that a land like that was going to do is going to produce a lot of mosquitoes and they're going to carry malaria and that's why people are going to get the egg you even they they didn't know that that's what it was that was were at work was that it was that

sort of the primary as we would see it now with the primary issue was with with terrain like that malaria was by far the kind of underlying constant in sickness and health in much of the United States particularly the southern portions of the Mississippi Valley throughout the 19th century. Now on top of malaria you've got all kinds of infections complications of childbirth farm accidents and sweeping epidemics that would come through epidemic say of cholera which is a fearsome disease that could kill people very suddenly it's spread it's also a parasite curse that disease and it's spread through contaminated water sources which is a real problem particularly crowded cities in this era. You have epidemics of scarlet fever of whooping cough of typhoid and then less epidemic but endemic and affecting almost every family in this period was also what 19th century people called consumption. What we would call tuberculosis. So people of the 19th century dealt with a variety of problems of health on an almost daily basis. And for those moving west

malaria was particularly at issue. And so yes we we would understand the mosquitoes as one reason why. Swampy places are unhealthy. But what was interesting to me in reading these sources is that 19th century people weren't weren't in a sense interested to reduce their environment down to one thing. I mean they felt that someplace that had hot humid heat and was smelly and swampy would be bad for you in all kinds of ways. And I think that that more holistic understanding of environment is key to getting at what 19th century people sort of thought about their bodies and about the land around them. We have some callers in fact our lines are filling up so we will see what's on the minds of the people who are listening starting out with a color you know in urban. Well number one first person here. Hello hello. Thank you this is very interesting. I have a family that started out on the East Coast and gradually moved west and you excited me

to go and check out my letter collection saying I have one dated June 21st 1836 which is written from Mount Morris New York about the death of a relative who had gone to the river area to buy land in King County. And I just looked at the letter here and it says. Erastus Park has gone to Illinois history to the largest land and business. When he died was the reason he didn't get the news sooner Rastus thinks it is a good country where Alija bought and healthy Eliab have the care of a larger threw all of his sickness which must have been very gratifying to the polls. And then. Here's another one. When they move farther are the different branches of hammering Britain on proper of June 42 from Kirkuk in the Iraq territory. Talking about all the people who have died.

You know what what I'm hearing in those letters is this sort of capsule of many peoples and many families experiences most of the 19th century that is this kind of chain migration where some family members usually the young men the young unattached men or sometimes married couples would move west and unfun move into what was then new territory to them. Of course it was inhabited by other people but to them it was new find land establish themselves and then write back for other family members. What I'm also here in is the prevalence of sick sickness that could often be mortal sickness the way in which care for other people and the kind of intimate and tender duties of nursing someone through an illness emptying bed pans cleaning sheets wringing out cloths and the feverish person cool. But that was something that many people engaged in. And here and these relatives of yours men engaged in it in the same in many of the same ways that women did. And I. Just as a historian I can't resist putting in a plug here that you and other listeners if you

have wonderful documents like this. I hope you consider either depositing originals or at least giving copies to your local historical society because these are wonderful fascinating documents of not only each family's history but also of our common heritage as Americans. Yeah so think about this is all I'm working on that wonderful thing all historians appreciate this. Can I just read it on their little excerpt. Well sure. OK this one was dated December 3rd 1840 too. These are my great great great grandparents. They had 10 children and they went to Kirkuk in 1940 and the two parents both were dead by 1844 leaving some very young children. Your brother I take this opportunity to inform you I am well and hope these few lines find you the same but we have had a great deal of sickness. My mother is dead. She died the eighth day of November. She was sick about six weeks with bilious fever. She was crazy about two weeks or so

died very easy and very sudden. She was rational for a week before she died. There have been three months with the bill your fever and chills have not been out of doors for a week and this is written I think from one of the children to his brother the one who stayed back in New York State with a kind of an organ. I mean I have been in letters in Syria from Kirkuk when the state of Iowa. Who who would really appreciate having a copy of these kind of things. You know most of the state historical societies and state archives and there are also I'm not familiar with the ones right near where you are but there are sometimes also smaller collections of County Historical Societies. Now we know that and if you are in here you know if you look at the blue pages of your phone book or look on line for the State Historical Society they can they can get you to where you want to be and they will actually do a lot of work to preserve and make sure that aging paper you know is is

carefully tended to and that these letters can be made available. Yeah but this is fascinating stuff. I mean this. I think for many of us the kind of drama in this spare or 19th century prose of maybe an older child or an adolescent or a young person writing to a sibling about the death of parents. Yeah. And in that that short remark you know he was great she was crazy for two weeks and then she's better. So she died easy. Yeah. Magine what it must be like right. I think there are some with probably 16 or so when he wrote the letter I want to be the responsible adult the Center-Right taking care of a sick parent. You know what we're generally very very small and by our standards very crowded surroundings with other siblings to take care of probably fields to take care of. Or it was a shop to run depending on what they did. You can get a sense in these these small bits of record of what people's lives must have been like in this era. Yeah I'm so fortunate to have this collection of the earliest letter I have written and 18th.

And I'm probably haven't read fifty of them I would already and my family was very much into collecting this sort of thing and I'm just so fortunate. I've been transcribing them to reflect quite a wealth. Yeah. Well thanks very much for sharing that our last several topic. We are already at our midpoint here in this part of focus and I would like to introduce Again our guest and we'll take some more calls. Our guest is contrary Valencia and her names but she's got more name than anybody I've talked to and sometimes if you take a Bolton Valencias And so if you're going to go look for the book her last name. Name is spelled V A L E N C I u s. And her first name kind a very c o n e v e r y. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of this book and if you're interested in the subject you definitely should look

for the book it's titled The health of the country how American settlers understood themselves and their land and published by Basic Books and it takes a look at how settlers in the the 19th century in the years before the Civil War people who were moving west how they thought about the relationship between the place that they lived and their health. We have some other folks to talk with and let us do that and next is. Belgium Illinois Why Number four a little town can find a very interesting one of them even though you mainly are speaking here in the Midwest an area that was definitely affected in the same way as our nation's capital. You know for years and years and years it was a horrid place to live for exactly the same reasons you said a lot of a lot of malaria yellow fever things like that just decimated people thought it was interesting that that would be the ground that they left at the government but also Indianapolis had a lot of problems like that very serious city that had serious problems for a long

time in its in its formative years with exactly the same problems. And here where we're at and east central Illinois our topography made us so we had a lot of marshes and stuff. It wasn't near rivers but they were land was very very swampy and and went and it took years and years to try to train the ground. Once or did we croak. Great crops but our forefathers suffered poor during some of the most innovative methods for training swampland were actually pioneered in Illinois because of the swampland that there were sentry glacial ponds that filled up with soil and then always sprayed wet. Thank you very much. I did one of the things that this caller is highlighting is the way in which the search for healthy place was so often frustrated when many throughout the 19th century in the early part there were incredible criticisms directed toward Washington D.C. because it was regarded widely and largely correctly as just a

cesspool of sickness partly for the hot humid summers and the swamping us of its topography. Many people who wanted to go to fertile land and who were discovering the incredible richness of what was then prairie soil were also discovering that that soil was swampy or could be overrun or during certain months of the year would sort of change into marshland. So this ideal of finding healthy land was often a kind of. It was often just that it remained an ideal but in fact people of the 19th century often lived lives mired in sickness. Interesting. Let's go in here with someone else in the next verse. We'll be back here in Urbana and line to follow along just to comment on that. Your discussion of the malaria problem reminds me that the tradition in the family was that when my family moved into northern Illinois in the Geneva area which is also

in county there was a daily ritual of taking applying I think I'm not sure when they no longer had to do it. Certainly by the turn of the century over I believe my grandmother told my father that she could remember taking prime time. She'd been born about 8 team 80. Quinine was a major remedy throughout the 19th century and in fact many of us still enjoy sipping a gin and tonic made of tonic water has quinine in it are and enjoying a sort of relic of this anti-malarial heritage. Quinine reduced the fever produced the fevers and it helped alleviate some of the symptoms of malaria and in some areas was also used as a preventative against against what that was known as they knew then of course it was hard to get. It was called Peruvian bark from kits and shown to be a South-American tree from which it was derived at that time. And many

people hucksters would sell fake bark that was for very very high prices and settlers who lived in very very remote regions often would go to great lengths to try to locate the bark as they called it or to locate other kinds of patent remedies which they hoped would alleviate their symptoms. I think what many people don't realize and that the more plentiful in northern Illinois for yet it wasn't. The candles but the flatland much of it was under water for say half of the year. Which we can easily picture why that challenging to people trying to grow crops. But it was also challenging to people trying to get anywhere and use roads and to stay healthy. Rather interesting lately an athlete's mosquito is still here. The malaria is gone. I'm not sure of just what the reason was in Europe. It's been hypothesized that the

introduction of large numbers of cattle. Had something to do with the mosquitoes would feed on cattle but the malaria parasite could not reproduce in their bloodstream and. Live from the incident. Mosquitoes that carry malaria the malaria parasite don't generally fly very far from the ponds in which they hatch. So if you can kill enough mosquitoes or cover the water with oil or some use insecticide to kill them or if you have human populations who are your potential reservoirs for the parasite who are scattered enough that a person who gets infected with malaria doesn't get bitten by a mosquito which then flies to someone else very easily. Then you can keep down the malaria. And part of what happened one historian has recently argued that malaria actually the rates of malaria actually began to decline precipitously in the United States even before the introduction in the

1950s and shortly after World War Two of insecticides. And that started because of the agricultural disruption at the time of the Great Depression and the fact that many many people who had lived and worked in low and agricultural areas found themselves out of work unable to support themselves and move to cities. And that effectively decreased the reservoir available to propagate malaria from for the turn of the century would have been 50 years before. I'm not you're certainly infected. You have nothing to do with the Brainerd simple answer because with virtually all right. Then the story of malarial decline is quite interesting because there isn't anyone I mean we might think that the magic bullet of bug spray would do it but that's not it that's not solely at its drainage. It's changing agricultural patterns changing population patterns and demographics and also a reduction in mosquito populations through chemical means.

Very interesting thanks for the code. Let's go again to another urban a person and this is why number three. Hello I'm the founder and ancestors of my husband who died in the 1849 in the County Ohio which is. Southwest of Cleveland still live in part of Ohio. And I couldn't figure out how she died why she died until I talked with my husband's aunt who who knew the story that she died of swamp fever. Recently there were cases of modern swamp fever in not far from as I think it was Decatur or Springfield Illinois. And I was wondering does describe the parasite or call the parasite lip or the disease Leptospirosis. So I was wondering whether you'd run across the term swamp fever and whether it was in the middle of the hundreds. Anything thought of as anything

different than malaria or whether it was a different disease. You have any idea. Well this is where it can be both sort of paradoxically both frustrating and enlightening to look at 19th century records. It's real frustrating if you want to know in our modern terms what if someone died. Because yes swamp fever is a term that's used but you know it often gets used along with a lot of other terms for kinds of fevers and they sometimes overlap and sometimes the very fact very often not considered definitions are not particularly consistent. And also many many people probably in the end succumbed to a combination of illnesses that is someone who they say died in childbirth. Well she might have recovered from that difficult childbirth if she hadn't always also been weakened by malaria and by a very good diet was very vitamin poor. You know so that there are many different kinds of factors that would go into any one person's demise. Now what that's real

frustrating to those of us who are trying to find out you know exactly what was going on in our modern terms. But I think it's also in lightning in terms of understanding how it is that people of that era would understand their health. So swamp fever wasn't necessarily a particular thing. It was more of a condition of fever that could then become another fever. If what they called predisposing causes would would change that fever you see so that the kinds of disease weren't as specifically different as they are today or they weren't understood that way. Instead different diseases could shade into one another depending on the course of the illness in an individual person's body. Well she didn't have her last child of two. In May of 48 and she dies in January. Forty nine so it was only seven months later presumably she and the child birth had some was a factor in all of this.

She was probably nursing which to takes you know makes a woman's body work very hard to produce milk for a child of that age. How old were her other children do you know. She had a son who was born three years before that. Before the second. No. And keep in mind too that very frequently in 19th century families if you have a couple kids born there seems to be a little more of a gap there now well have been a miscarriage in between. So in other words the number of pregnancies is actually often far greater or is often greater than the number of children who live into infancy. So that the toll when we're looking particularly at women's health. That the very high fertility rates particularly among women moving into the south and west to tended to have more children than women in more settled parts of the northeast that the physical work that women's bodies did in becoming pregnant and and sustaining children both before and after birth. It is a huge factor in understanding what they got sick of or how they

survived. I was very interesting speaking of a different part of the country but similar time. I've mentioned this on the calling him before but it was really interesting to go to the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of New York City because they talk about the health issues and why people get so sick and pointed out that the way that New York City was developed was that the they built the buildings on the street kind of in a donut fashion facing the street and in the middle of the block was the outhouse and the well from where you dumped your garbage. Frequently right next to each other. Yeah well the crowded conditions there are so many people became so ill I think that is really interesting. OK thank you. We have 10 minutes left. Our guest on a very real NCIS. The book is titled The health of the country how American settlers understood themselves and their land She's assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis and questions welcome. Three

three three W. wild toll free 800 1:58 W while we we're still talking about a time when people as they tried to. Understand and think about the body and how it worked and why people got sick. There was still this idea that there were these basic forces in the body and as long as things were relatively in balance that people were all right but it was when things got out of balance. But there were problems and that was the thinking that underlie the medical practice of bleeding for such a long period of time. How and interested in in this how it is that this notion of the bodily health and the forces there were work in the body how people also took that same kind of thinking and applied it to nature and and how nature that the natural environment worked. I mean what's fascinating here is I think we have to under. And how messy the body really is. Right when we don't use all of our Senate Terry products and deodorants and modern medical techniques

and the 19th century people had you know frequently encountered episodes of vomiting of diarrhea. They certainly sweat like crazy when they're out in the sun. Many more women were lactating than are because of higher rates of childbirth and greater rates of breastfeeding than today. So emanations from the body were much more apparent and in essence people couldn't wash their clothes as much as we do today they were much more with you for longer periods of time. And this notion that the body has stuff inside it that it needs to keep in balance and you have to when you have an excess of something that is if you drink too much or if you feel passionate thoughts or rage or if you drink raw or eat raw food it would be stimulating. Then you have maybe too much of a what was called a humor in your body and you need to get that out and you might get it out by burping or by vomiting but you might also have to be relieved of it by a physician or a friend or someone down

the road who would come bleed you. Or more put a sweat making Thank you. Do what was called sweating it out but put blankets on you to make you sweat or apply a poultice or a caustic plaster to raise an irritation in the skin. So what people were doing by those techniques which sound really barbaric to us today was to try to replicate the ways in which even a healthy body gets waste products out of itself. They saw that also in what was going on in the land around them. So that for instance when a swamp was smelly and gross and gave off gases and odors that was very similar to what happened to a body one filled with infection or a body who did even the wrong kind of food. So what nineteenth century people thought. I think very logically in their terms was that if they wanted to improve the health of land they should cut into it. They should open it the same way they would their own bodies. They would plow that land. They would tear up tree roots try to create openings in the earth to let

out foul miasma that might make them sick because it would be very it would be a process of change which was quite perilous in 19th century terms. But ultimately that body of land would become more healthy as a result. Very very interesting. We have some other callers will go to a call here in Champaign line one. Hello. Yes go ahead. I have a question for for the professor. It's something I have been and I've discussed several times and I think you touched on it but why isn't there a bigger than my asthma bank why is there so little malaria at least in this country now. Is that because of the draining of the pond. Some of it is because of draining of swamps. It's because we use chemical insecticides to kill reservoirs of mosquitoes. It's because we no longer have large portions of our population working in a watery labor draining swamps.

Raising Rice raising cotton raising soybeans largely that's mechanized today. You know we don't have large groups of people who are working in fields and we don't have large groups of farm workers families living in unscreened an air conditioned shacks near farms. So we've removed a lot of the potential reservoir of malaria. We've also eliminated a lot of the habitats for mosquitoes and we have sprayed enough that we no longer have endemic malaria in this country. Now what we are seeing is a resurgence in forms of malaria borne disease. That is we haven't quite got the mosquito borne disease so we haven't quite figured out how to control mosquitoes. Many parts of this country have been fearing this summer West Nile virus. Right. We are much more aware of mosquito transmission now than people could have been 100 years ago. And what we're attempt there's 150 years ago.

So what you know now there are compelling campaigns for instance in my home city of St. Louis that homeowners are encouraged to check you know their backyard for any small even really quite minuscule sources of stagnant water in which mosquitoes could be breeding. Very interesting. Can I add what I have time for a second question. Well we have one of the personnel we have a couple minutes I hope. Thanks for being understanding. I would like to try to get the one more person in her hand or stand and. Well thank you this would be a caller in on her Bana line number two. Hello. Yeah I just wanted to mention that or ask if your guest had to compare how very much worse it would be to the closer you get to the equator in the 19th century. The reason I asked say that is because of some account of a recently particularly William Masters of

Purdue University in market melon that tough came up with a theory saying that. It's really what makes some countries wealthy and from countries poorer more that available rather than truth through productively and help can control these in particular malaria. So I just want to bring that the mention into the discussion. You know what's fascinating to me about that kind of economic theory and also about some of the kind of environmental conversations that we have today are the ways in which those come back to hearken back to 19th century notions. I mean this idea that zones of the world are largely defined by latitude and that one personal health and social well-being and economic well-being can be largely attributed to one's latitude in that it is a fundamental notion of 19th century geography and

medical geography. What's And what's so interesting to me is that I think. Largely because our conversations about the essences of people have changed I mean that is we no longer. Most of us think that human beings are physically formed by the environments that we come from or live in. And so we tend to think well no we can just go to a new place and not be not be changed by that. You can have a company and transfer you know move its workers to a new state and that doesn't change the operations of the company. Nineteenth century people would say What are you talking about. Those new people have to be acclimated. They have to become in balance with their new form an equilibrium with their new environment. And of course they will have different patterns of life they'll have different forms of productivity they will be radically altered by that change. And I wonder whether to some extent we're coming around to question some of this notion in our modern world that things can be exactly the same and be homogenously in different

places. There is so much more that I would like to be able to ask. We're coming down the boy we have just a couple of minutes left. In fact just about one or two. Did we talk about the fact that here people were coming from places where they had been raised and grown up into different environments had different kind of challenges to their health. Were there also things that people found in the environment to aid their health. Oh absolutely. Many Americans coming into places copied Native American cures they often felt that basically that the notion was that where God put it is ease there he would also put cures for it. So people searched endlessly into the fruits the nuts the herbs of the earth even the soils of new places or places new to them to try to find cures. And one of the main places people looked was to different kinds of water. I mean we tend to think of water is just one thing that comes out of our tap for that we maybe buy in a plastic bottle in a supermarket shelf. But the 19th century folks water water was just a variety

of stuff. So black so for us it's water from a mineral spring could taste foul and smell awful but could restore you to good health if you were sick. Other kinds of mineral waters could be good for certain particular elements. Muddy water of the Mississippi was said to be very healthful because it would keep your body in because it was strong water and it would keep your body strong. So looking for the waters of the place was a crucial aspect of 19th century settlement not only because waterways were the way people got around and communicated and because they need water to farm but also because different kinds of waters springs and rivers and creeks and so on were important as part of a medical understanding of the world. We're going to have to stop and for people who would like to read more on the subject I certainly should recommend will recommend that you look at the book we've been talking about which is titled The health of the country by con a very Valencia's again her last name is spelled V A L E N C U S and is published by Basic Books.

Kind of airy Valencia's teaches at Washington University in St. Louis where she lives. Thanks very much for talking with us today we certainly appreciate it. Oh it's been a real pleasure thank you.