THE REVEREND FRANCIS HIGGINSON DESCRIBES HIS YOUNG DAUGHTER'S DEATH FROM SMALLPOX ON BOARD A SHIP BOUND FOR MASSACHUSETTS IN 1629

Abstract

The Reverend Francis Higginson, his wife, and his eight children left England on the Talbot on April 25, 1629, bound for Massachusetts to prepare the way for Governor Winthrop and his party of 400 colonists who were to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony the following year (1630).

His letter of July 24, 1629, addressed to friends in England, contains one of the earliest pediatric reports in the history of American pediatrics.

And this day towards night my daughter grew sicker, and many blue spots were seen upon her breast, which affrighted us. At the first we thought they had been the plague tokens, but we found afterwards that it was only an high measure of the infection of the pox, which were struck again into the child, and so it was God's will the child die about six of the clock at night, being the first in our ship that was buried in the bowels of the great Atlanticke Sea, which as it was a grief to us her parents and a terror to all the rest as being the beginning of a contagious disease and mortality. So in the same judgment it pleased God to remember mercy in that child, in freeing it from a world of misery wherein otherwise she had lived all her days. For being about four years old a year since, we know not by what means [she] swayed in the back, so that it was broken and grew crooked, and the joints of her hips were loosed and her knees went crooked, pitiful to see, since which time she hath had a most lamentable pain in her belly and would ofttimes cry out in the day and in her sleep also, "My belly!" which declared some extraordinary distemper, so that in respect of her we had cause to take her death as a blessing from the Lord to shorten her misery.