t the number
is small. Why Virginia should have been spared--especially in view of
the known rat-infestation aboard ship--remains a question.

The evidence relative to yellow fever, or calenture, during this period
in Virginia is contradictory. Early sources do make reference to
numerous deaths from it at sea and even to an epidemic of it at
Jamestown before 1610, but subsequent notices are infrequent and of
questionable validity. Prevalence of the disease in the earlier years
and its comparative infrequency in later is not a likely circumstance
because with the increase of commerce, especially from tropical ports,
an increase of the disease should have followed.

Smallpox, the mark of which is seen in early portraits, emerges from
the colonial record with a more reasonable history. Its incidence in
Virginia during the first half of the seventeenth century was small,
and this might be expected in view of the fact that there were few
children in the colony and that most of the adults had been infected
before they left the Old World. The number of smallpox epidemics in
Virginia did increase--again, as might be expected--later in the
century as the number of children and of native-born unimmunized adults
multiplied.

Smallpox caused such a scare in 1696 that the assembly, in session at
Jamestown, asked for a recess--another example of the influence of
disease upon political history. Earlier, in 1667, a sailor with
smallpox, if the contemporary account can be accepted, landed at
Accomack and was solely responsible for the outbreak of a terrible
epidemic on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. A measles epidemic during
the last decade of the century may actually have been smallpox as the
two diseases were often confused by contemporaries.

Respiratory disorders, as has been noted, caused much distress for
great numbers of early Virginians during the winter months. Influenza,
pneumonia, and pleurisy must have reached epidemic proportions on
numerous occasions in Virginia as elsewhere in America (influenza
epidemics are recorded for New England in 1647 and in 1697-99). One
note from a Virginia source for the year 1688 describes "a fast for the
great mortality (the first time the winter distemper was soe very
fatal... the people dyed, 1688, as in a plague... bleeding the remedy,
Ld Howard had 80 ounces taken from him...)." (If "Ld Howard" gave
eighty ounces, it means that he lost five pints of blood from a body
that contained ap