American Westward Migration Thesis

American Westward migration during the nineteenth century was a difficult journey for various reasons. Emotionally many of the migrants were leaving the majority of their friends, family and belongings behind. Additionally there was the stress of having to lighten the load by walking the journey or leaving behind precious belongings along the way. Emigrants traveled in wagon trains banded together with other single men heading to gold rushes, or in groups of extended family and neighbors. The hardships of the journey stressed those traveling and added to fears from reported attacks, disease and many other disasters imagined and real. {THESIS STATEMENT:?}Disease was a major part of American life, and while it affected life on the overland trails,
“Hundreds died on that long trail. They died of cholera and black canker, of sheer exhaustion and hunger and the bitter cold.” The speech illustrates how common, how regular and how deadly disease was on the Overland Trails. Mormon migrants had a huge advantage in communal support from the church body and still many perished. Stories of these difficulties, especially those of the infamous Donner party, filtered back East to gathering places as emigrants prepared and waited for spring to begin their own
“We fought the enemy hard and were successful in effecting cures in three-fourths of the cases, but found it impossible to save all…” One aspect of the difficulty in treatment at the time was an ongoing debate about the cause of disease and how best to treat it. There were two basic sides to each argument. The continuing debate between miasmic, a holdover of earlier medical theory which believed that bad humors or smells created disease, and bacterial, via germ theory, as modes of transmission delayed medical response. Medical experts stood firmly entrenched on both sides of each argument. Treatment options were just as divided between allopathic and homeopathic methods.
Allopathic and homeopathic remedies, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, are opposing ways of approaching disease treatment specifically through the way they decide what treatments will produce a cure. This is a continuing debate as definitions change and more evidence is heaped on both sides. During the nineteenth-century, practices such as improving sanitary conditions were considered homeopathic because germ theory had not been completely accepted yet. It would take years after the invention of the microscope in the 1880’s to convince the scientific and medical