Abstract
It is curious to see how completely social ethics and relations have changed since olden days. Aid in our families in times of stress and need is not given to us now by kindly neighbors as of yore; we have well-arranged systems by which we can buy all that assistance, and pay for it, not with affectionate regard, but with current coin.
It is curious to see how completely social ethics and relations have changed since olden days. Aid in our families in times of stress and need is not given to us now by kindly neighbors as of yore; we have well-arranged systems by which we can buy all that assistance, and pay for it, not with affectionate regard, but with current coin.
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Notes
A. M. Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days (Lee, Mass., 1993 [1898]), 388, 391.
R. L. Bushman, ‘Markets and Composite Farms in Early America’, WMQ 55 (1998). For overviews of the ‘market revolution’ in the nineteenth century, S. Wilenz, ‘Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815–1848’, in E. Foner ed., The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990), 51–71
and C. Sellers, The Market Revolution (New York, 1991). A. Kulikoff, ‘The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America’, WMQ 46 (1989) reviews how early Americanists have taken up the issue.
P. Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York, 1982), 22.
E. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); idem, “‘Man, Woman, and Chore Boy”: Transformations in the Antagonistic Demands of Work and Care on Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, The Milbank Quarterly, 73 (1995); idem, ‘A “Terrible and Exhausting” Struggle: Family Caregiving During the Transformation of Medicine’, IHM, 50 (1995).
M. Pelling, The Common Lot (1998); P. Horden, ‘Household Care and Informal Networks: Comparisons and Continuities from Antiquity to the Present’; S. Cavallo, ‘Family Obligations and Inequalities in Access to Care in Northern Italy, Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in P. Horden and R. Smith eds, The Locus of Care (1998), chs 1, 3.
Prominent works, with a special emphasis on New England, include: P. Cash, E. H. Christianson and J. Worth Estes eds, Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620–1820 (Boston, 1980); E. H. Christianson, ‘The Emergence of Medical Communities in Massachusetts, 1700–1794’, BHM, 54 (1980); N. Gevitz, “‘Pray Let the Medicines Be Good”: The New England Apothecary in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Pharmacy in History, 41 (1999); P. Benes ed., Medicine and Healing, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife 15 (Boston, 1990); P. A. Watson, The Angelical Conjunction (Knoxville, 1991); L. T. Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale (New York, 1990); R. J. Tannenbaum, The Healer’s Calling (Ithaca, 2002).
C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation (New York, 1998). On the ‘social work’ that fueled the social credit economy,
see K. V. Hansen, A Very Social Time (Berkeley, 1994), esp. ch. 4.
C. Muldrew, “‘Hard Food for Midas”: Cash and Its Social Value in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 170 (2001). On ‘complex barter’, M. Merrill and S. Wilentz eds, The Key of Liberty (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 12.
The literature on the dimensions of the money economy is vast. R. L. Bushman’s, From Puritan to Yankee (Cambridge, 1967), chs 7–9, remains useful, and I am indebted (if I may use the term) to Professor Bushman for the term ‘money economy’.
J. Winthrop, ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, in C. Mulford ed., Early American Writings (New York, 2002), 238–9.
For an exploration of these tensions, M. A. Peterson, ‘Life on the Margins: Boston’s Anxieties of Influence in the Atlantic World’, in W. Klooster and A. Padula eds, The Atlantic World (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2005).
For public debate over currency in New England, see M. E. Newell, From Dependency to Independence (Ithaca, 1998), chs 7–11. Newell emphasizes the liberating potential of paper money.
Westborough’s population was 1110 in 1765 and hovered around 900 for the last quarter of the century, H. P. DeForest and E. C. Bates, The History of Westborough, Massachusetts (Westborough, 1891), part II, 345. The portions of the diary discussed here are in The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1703–1782: FirstPart, Three Volumes in One, 1719–1755, ed. F. G. Walett (Worcester, 1974). On Parkman, see R. W. Beales, Jr, ‘Nursing and Weaning in an EighteenthCentury New England Household’, in Peter Benes ed., Families and Children (Boston, 1987); idem, “‘Slavish” and Other Female Work in the Parkman Household, Westborough, Massachusetts, 1724–1782’, in P. Benes ed., House and Home (Boston, 1990), 48–57; idem, ‘The Reverend Ebenezer Parkman’s Farm Workers, Westborough, Massachusetts, 1726–1782’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 99 (1989). See also Rose Ann Lockwood, ‘Birth, Illness, and Death in 18th-Century New England’, Journal of Social History, 12 (1978).
For the initial law, see The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts (Boston, 1887), 238. On Acadians, see J. M. Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme (New York, 2005), 373–5, 378–80 and the town petitions, found in Massachusetts State Archives, Massachusetts Archives Collection, vols 23–4.
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Mutschler, B. (2007). Illness in the ‘Social Credit’ and ‘Money’ Economies of Eighteenth-Century New England. In: Jenner, M.S.R., Wallis, P. (eds) Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591462_9
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