Jeremiah Barker: Background, Education, and Writings

An overview of Barker’s life includes a brief genealogy of his family, his marriages and children, the Penobscot Expedition, and a description of the geographic, social, religious, economic, and demographic setting of Gorham and Portland, Maine, in the late 1700s. The provenance of the Barker manuscript is followed by a summary of its contents, including material from the diary of Portland’s Rev. Thomas Smith detailing epidemics and diseases from 1735 to 1780 and Barker’s own discussion of mental illness, consumption, and a wide assortment of ailments and issues such as epidemic fever, bloodletting, childbed fever, cancer, public health, consumption, yellow fever, and the “dangers of spirituous liquors.” The chapter concludes with Dr. Samuel Mitchill’s 1798 article on medical geography and its relationship to epidemics in the United States and Britain, comments on the American medical book trade, a list of Barker’s articles published in the first and second US medical journals, and comments on yellow fever in Maine.