On June 10, 1641, a Day of Humiliation was called by the church of Plymouth Colony, a day set aside for prayer and privation, “for the healing of a bloody cough among children.” The cough was probably whooping cough, also known as “chin cough,” which could cause hemorrhage of the throat. The disease, caused by bacteria, was spread through droplets sprayed into the air when an infected person coughed or sneezed.
It would be two hundred years before microbes would be discovered and the germ theory of disease would be developed. With only herbs, roots, and turpentine oil to use as treatments for the bloody cough, many children died. In 1659, Reverend Danforth of Roxbury wrote, “the Lord sent a general visitation of children by coughs and colds, of which my three children, Sarah, Mary, and Elizabeth Danforth died, all of them within the space of a fortnight.”
A broadside published in 1736 entitled “Awakening Call to the Children of New England,” warned children to “set always God before your eyes,” because a “grievous and mortal sickness” could take you away at any time. To drive the point home, the author describes a pitiful deathbed scene as parents attend their sick child: “With weeping eyes they will lament to see your little breast, heaving and panting up and down while you can find no rest. O my dear father cried the child, and loving Mother too, by Death I must be snatched away, and never more see you. … My heavenly father bid me come and I must obey the call.”
Today, as it was 400 years ago, contagious disease is terrifying. We are very much like the colonists in that so little is known about the corona virus at this time. Unlike them we understand how it is spread and can take precautions.
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