I couldn't imagine living in an environment similar to Ohio of just two hundred years ago. From Oberlin College http://www.oberlin.edu/news-info/02jun/observations_mary_garvin1.html
Wolves and rattlesnakes were a constant threat, but the fever, commonly referred to as malaria, ague, or bilious or autumnal fever, was feared most. One pioneer confessed "a wholesome fear of two things: fever and ague and rattlesnakes" (3). Because the fever was often contracted around the wetlands, settlers thought it was caused by inhaling the "bad air," "miasma," or "malaria" that they associated with the rotting vegetation of swamps.
However, the fever was often debilitating and accommodating the shakes wasn’t always an option. Malaria disabled entire families as described in this account of Michigan frontier life: "The malarial gases set free, that country became very sickly…crops went back into the ground, animals suffered for food, and if the people had not been too sick to need much to eat, they too must have gone hungry. The pale, sallow, bloated faces of that period were the rule; there were no healthy faces except of persons just arrived"
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