Early in January 1867, Celestia Webster began to worry about her sore throat. Her fears were justified. Within a few days, she became so ill that she was confined to bed, lost her teaching position, and her family feared she would die. Celestia neither died nor recovered, but her body was altered. She lived with a chronic condition for her remaining fourteen years. In this talk, I will explore how Webster and her family, middle-class white Americans living in rural western New York, understood and reacted to health and illness. My focus on the Webster household reorients the history of medicine from the perspective of practitioners to that of the patient and her caregivers, asking what insights such personal accounts add to our knowledge of life and illness before germ theory.
Melanie Kiechle - Associate Professor, Department of History
Virginia Tech
Melanie A. Kiechle is Associate Professor in History at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America and articles about public health, buried creeks, and other nineteenth-century decisions that still affect us today. Melanie is currently writing a microhistory that explores how Americans dealt with illness before germ theory.
