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Book Review
| The Health of the Country: How Americans Understood Themselves and Their Land. By Conevery Bolton Valencius. New York: Basic Books, 2002. viii + 388 pp. $30.00.
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| Settlers arriving in a new country often observed whether their surroundings were "healthful." American emigrants who wrote on the subject recognized a correspondence between qualities of climate, soil, and situation and specific conditions of body and mind. This relationship between the nature internal and external to settlers' bodies is the subject of The Health of the Country by Conevery Bolton Valencius. The author considers her subject through the lenses of nineteenth-century medicine, geography, folk wisdom, politics, and race. The narrative focuses on two settler communities—Missouri and Arkansas—during the first half of the nineteenth century. |
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Valencius collects the language that settlers and physicians used to talk about the bodily dimensions of place, including "constitution," "miasma," "force and flow," "fevers," and healing powers. A chapter on race highlights the idea of "acclimation" and "degeneration," both expressions of fear on the part of white emigrants that they might change racially upon entering climates thought be suitable only for Indians or Africans. The book is at its best in the chapter on "Local Knowledge." As Valencius discovers, southern medical students traveled north for their educations, then returned to apply their own regional methods for treating disease. Doctors developed working theories of climate and well being and depended on their experience in the South to diagnose sickness. Valencius's use of early medical geography is skillful. These attempts to determine the most healthful places for settlement illustrate how imaginative mapping functioned as an intellectual process for integrating new territories into the United States. |
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Yet the lack of medical knowledge that rendered every settler an authority on salubriousness makes the widely varying judgments documented in this book seem arbitrary. Healthfulness could be a political weapon between the sections, for example. Northerners fearful of emigration often referred to the West and South as unfavorable to health. Sometimes the subject ceased to matter at all. Emigrants from South Carolina interested in the rich black soils of Alabama disregarded warnings about the extreme humidity of the climate and its potential for disease, perhaps because they came from a similar climate, perhaps because nothing made them feel better than the prospect of rich land for planting cotton. |
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The book is written with energy and imagination. Valencius has revealed that settlers did not draw sharp distinctions between their bodies and their land, and she presents a kind of dictionary to an almost-forgotten lexicon of place. As they considered how they would become part of the lands they inhabited, settlers of Missouri and Arkansas in the nineteenth century also thought about how their lands would become part of them. |
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Reviewed by Steven Stoll, associate professor of history at Yale University and author of Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (2002). |
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