No Cause, No Cure

First of all, should I put a mature content warning on this?

I'm sort of a geek for medical history, if only for the fact that it reminds me just how much better off we are today than we were in the past. The scene here depicts the practice of bloodletting, which was the most common medical procedure performed by doctors from antiquity until the mid-1800s. The idea was that the body was made of four different "humors"--blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm--that controlled everything from personality to health. If a person's humors were out of balance, they got sick. So bloodletting was meant to relieve the body of "excess" blood and restore balance to the humors. From a modern medical standpoint I think we can all tell why this was a bad idea...

My victim here is colonial Maryland, of course. The time frame is mid-1600s. At this time, diseases like malaria and smallpox were very prevalent among the colonists of the mid-Atlantic. Poor little Anna was a very sickly child. Although she rarely caught any actual disease, the collective negative health of the colonists had a huge effect on her own health. Obviously, the physicians of St. Mary's City were baffled!

The woman here is named Agnes Talbot, and she served as Anna's nurse and mother-like figure throughout the early years of Anna's life. Technically, Anna's "father" was Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, but seeing as he never visited North America, she never knew him well. Anna lived in the households of the acting governors, but they changed so often that she never felt much stability there. Agnes Talbot and her husband, Edward, effectively raised little Anna on their own. This situation was obviously complicated when they grew old and Anna remained a little girl. When Agnes died in 1703, Anna was absolutely inconsolable for weeks. Unfortunately, that's the sort of thing young Anna had to learn to deal with quite frequently.

I spent so effin long on this one, lol. Please check out some of the details...

If you have any questions, just ask.

And if you want me to do something historically-themed with your state, I'm taking requests.