measures to promote proper treatment. Because the
incapacitating aspects of the disease could produce the appearance of
idleness, numerous ill persons must have been innocently stigmatized.
Their situation became hopeless when denied rations because the
authorities wished to discipline the apparently lazy.

Insomuch as the ague (or malaria) exacted a high toll in
seventeenth-century Europe--especially in England--it would be
reasonable to assume that, with typhoid and dietary disorders, this
disease caused most of the illness in Virginia. When emphasis has been
placed, by authorities, upon the location of Jamestown as a
disease-producing factor, the implication has often been that the
swampy area was a mosquito and malaria breeding place. A number of
historians have asserted that malaria produced the highest mortality
figures at Jamestown. Much is also made of the tragic circumstance that
the arresting agent for the disease, cinchona bark or quinine, was
known on the European continent by mid-seventeenth century but that
little use was made of it.

Dr. Blanton, the authority on seventeenth-century Virginia medicine, in
contrast argues that "there is not evidence ... that malaria was
responsible for a preponderating part of the great mortalities of the
Seventeenth Century in Virginia." He bases this conclusion on a number
of facts: he has been able to find only five or six references to the
ague (malaria) in the records of the century; because the ague was
well-known he does not believe its symptoms, such as the racking chill,
would have escaped notice. On the other hand, he does not doubt the
presence of the ague in Virginia throughout the century even though it
did not cause the most distress.

As in the case of the ague, a reasonable assumption would be that the
plague existed in seventeenth-century Virginia. The Great Plague of
London (1665) carried away 69,000 persons, and other cities of Europe
had even more disastrous epidemics. During the two years before the
first settlers arrived at Jamestown, over 2000 victims were buried in
London. The accounts of the ocean voyage indicate rat-infested ships.
Ships of the London Company reported plague and death aboard.
Virginians took pains to describe their illnesses, and there would have
been little difficulty in recognizing this well-known killer. Yet
little evidence of the presence of the plague appears in the
seventeenth-century Virginia record; cases are reported bu