Noah Webster, Proto Epidemiologist, Pestilence, & Politics
Description: Noah Webster (1758–1843), best known for the Dictionary (1828) that bears his name, also worked as an educator, newspaper editor, lawyer, and politician and advocated for universal education, social welfare, and public health. Though not a physician, between 1796 and 1800 he published two books and many articles on disease, public health, the yellow fever epidemics, quarantine, and he catalyzed the creation of the first U.S. medical journal, the Medical Repository (1797–1824). Webster’s research into epidemic diseases, though under-appreciated, sought to understand the cause and prevention of such epidemics.
In the 1790s, the young Republic faced yearly yellow fever epidemics. Webster sought to the understand these outbreaks by gathering numerical data and his work influenced figures like Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson and made lasting contributions to American medical thought. Webster’s extensive data collection emphasized the relationship between cosmic and environmental
factors on epidemics. As interest in public health and health statistics grew, Webster became, for both physicians and public health officials, a forerunner of a scholar who, fifty years later, would be called an “epidemiologist.” My research explores Webster’s medical writings, their publication challenges, and contemporary responses. Sources include the Noah Webster Papers at the New
York Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and collections at Yale and Harvard. Key questions addressed are why Webster engaged in this medical debate, his methods for gathering data, contemporary reactions, and the impact of his work. Additionally, I examine his unpublished revisions of A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases (1799), held at the New York Public Library.
Brief Bio.: Richard Kahn, a retired internist, is the author of Diseases in the District of Maine 1772–1820: the Unpublished Work of Jeremiah Barker, a Rural Physician in New England, Oxford University Press, 2020. His interest in medical history began at Tufts Medical School under Dr. Benjamin Spector. That interest has continued for the past 40+ years researching, writing and teaching students, residents, medical societies, and the public. For the past 4 decades, in one capacity or another he’s been associated with the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the American Osler Society, serving as president. His wife of 60 years and his best friend, Patty is a retired medical librarian. They have lived in midcoast Maine for the past 50 years.
Title page of Webster’s Revision Copy of A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases. “In Two Volumes” is crossed out and replaced by handwritten “second edition review by the author” and on the verso Webster crossed out the printed institutional affiliations and added a handwritten list adding The American Philosophical Society [elected to membership in 1827] Courtesy of NYPL