The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land Book

A fascinating and throughly researched account of how Anglo and African American settlers understood the connection between themselves and the land to which they emigrated, Conevery Valencius' The Health of the Country provides a theory of American westward expansion not often explored. Much has been made of the connection that the displaced Native populations felt to their land, but Valencius' work asserts that much the same could be said of white settlers as well.

The Health of the Country relies on a variety of primary sources (principally personal journals, but also scientific logs, subsequent interviews, and popular publications of the time) and academic texts to assert that white settlers' assessment of new lands was inextricably linked to their own well-being. That is, the "health" of an area was determined using the same idioms and assessments the settlers used on their physical selves. Valenčius describes "place," or environment, for white settlers as such:

[…] not simply grass over which people strode, or the waters through which they pushed unwilling mules, or the air that sometimes caressed and sometimes punished them, but an amalgamation of sense and essence filling the whole perceived world, a unified experience of external reality that mightily constrained, though it never fully circumscribed, the efforts and will of its inhabitants.

In other words, the settlers who moved to new western areas experienced landscape in a profound and, to them, quantifiable way. If someone took sick with ague, "airs" or miasmas were to blame. Natural wonders like hot springs might be seen as a remedy to an assortment of ailments. Healthy land, like a healthy body, showed itself to be fecund, free of "blockages," and in "balance." Similar words were used to describe these processes, and it was not a one way street'the environment in which people lived or emigrated affected their health drastically (almost exclusively, as they understood it), but a healthful emigrant could likewise wreak huge changes on the land. Care for land, specifically in regards to cultivation, was similar to doctoring an ill person, and the processes observed the same logic.

This text is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in American medical history, the history of American expansion, or simply anyone looking to gain a better understanding of how people understood their world and their bodies in the mid-nineteenth century.