c authorities make
clear the fact that the cause of disease was not commonly thought to be
supernatural by the educated and responsible. Contemporary accounts
make known the widespread disapproval of foul ships, crowded quarters,
marshy land, stagnant air, bad food and drink, excessive eating, and
exposure to a hot sun.

Lord De la Warr laid down regulations for Jamestown designed to
eliminate the dangers of dirty wash water ("no ... water or suds of
fowle cloathes or kettle, pot, or pan ... within twenty foote of the
olde well"); and of contamination from sewage ("nor shall any one
aforesaid, within lesse than a quarter of one mile from the
pallisadoes, dare to doe the necessities of nature"). The order argued
that if the inhabitants did not separate themselves at least a quarter
of one mile from the palisaded living area that "the whole fort may be
choaked, and poisoned with ill aires and so corrupt." The colonists by
the same order had to keep their own houses and the street before both
sweet and clean.

Any doubt that an awareness existed of the dangers of infection by
contact, at least from diseases with observable bodily symptoms, should
be dispelled by the quarantine measures taken by the colonel and
commander of Northampton County in 1667 during an epidemic of smallpox.
He ordered that no member of a family inflicted with the disease should
leave his house until thirty days after the outbreak lest the disease
be spread by infection "like the plague of leprosy." Enlightened
authorities in Europe took similar precautions.

CHAPTER FOUR

Education, Women, Churchmen, and The Law

THE PLACE OF WOMEN IN MEDICINE

Women played a part in treating and caring for the ill and distressed
in a number of ways during the century. A few women dispensed medicine
and enjoyed reputations as doctors, but it was in the field of
obstetrics and as midwives that they made their most important
contributions. Although women did what might be described generally as
nursing, their contribution in this area was relatively insignificant
when compared with the importance of the female nurse today. Any
discussion of the place of women in seventeenth-century medicine should
note the relationship between women, witchcraft, and medicine.

Although the references leave no doubt of the existence of female
doctors and dispensers of medicines, the mention of them is infrequent.
Mrs. Mary Seal, the widow of a Dr. Power, for example, a