Lo, the Poor Indian!

IT is well established that the Massachusetts Bay Indians were nearly swept away on more than one occasion in the early seventeenth century by a highly infectious disease. The ailment may have been smallpox, typhus fever or a virulent form of typhoid. Records do not exist to differentiate; the listings are merely "plague" or "fever." Samuel Fuller, the Mayflower physician, died of such a "fever" in 1633, and many have thought his terminal illness was smallpox, although James Thacher, the most reliable early historian, called it cautiously "an infectious fever" and wrote that "the same disease proved very fatal among . . .