You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hello, and thank you for joining the American Revolution.

Today, episode 142, Disease in the revolution.

I said last week I would be covering Burgoyne's Northern Army

as it prepared to attack Fort Ticonderoga this week. However, I changed my mind. I'm going to do something a little different this week.

Normally I cover a specific event in time during the American Revolution. But as the COVID-19

pandemic spreads across the world, I thought it would be interesting this week to

take a broader look at disease in the American Revolution.

In the 18th century, disease was a part of life and a common cause of death.

For those of us who live in the 21st century and who take antibiotics and advance

medical care as a given it may be hard to appreciate how far we've really

come from a time when amputations with dirty saws and unwashed hands

were the norm and a simple cold could kill you.

The 18th century was a time that if you lived to adulthood you had beaten the odds.

Infant mortality rates from that era, which are sketchy and can vary depending on your source, seem to show that your odds of making it to

ten years old was about 40 percent. Less than a third made it to age 20. Europeans had brought many diseases to North America, which famously

wiped out more than 90% of the native population. The reason the pilgrims were able to settle in Plymouth, Massachusetts and found good farming land there ready for planting,

was that explorers had traveled through that same area while infected with smallpox a few years earlier

and wiped out every member of the tribe that had lived there. Disease in the colonial

era was always a problem, but wars always made a bad situation worse.

Crowding people together in large groups, providing inadequate food, or poor access to fresh foods and putting soldiers

under exposure all led to high death rates among the military without a shot

being fired. The British Army calculated that it lost about 11% of its soldiers just transporting them across the Atlantic Ocean.

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