Romanticism and Colonial Disease

Colonial experience was profoundly structured by disease, as expansion brought people into contact with new and deadly maladies. Pathogens were exchanged on a scale far greater than ever before. Native populations were decimated by wave after wave of Old World diseases. In turn colonists suffered disease and mortality rates much higher than in their home countries. Not only disease, but the idea of disease and the response to it, deeply affected both colonizers and those colonized.