Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. When plague appeared, they boarded up houses and fled to the countryside. By contrast, the historian Neal Salisbury observed, family and friends in Indian New England gathered at the sufferer’s bedside to wait out the illness, a practice that “could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.” Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. “We had no belief that one Man could give [a disease] to another,” the Blackfoot raider remembered, “any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another.” Because they knew of no
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