Abstract
Yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, malaria, infuenza, and countless other diseases swept through eighteenth-century North America with frightening regularity. As Jeanne E. Abrams makes clear, no one, not even the elite families of the founding fathers, was immune from the ravages of disease. Abrams provides an eminently readable account of the illnesses and health of the “founding fathers and mothers” that focuses on the Franklins, the Adamses, the Washingtons, and the Jeffersons. Piecing together letters, diaries, and other sources, Abrams recounts in vivid detail the founding families’ frequent encounters with illness and death, arguing that these personal experiences directly infuenced the development of early public health policies; however, the policy history frequently gets lost in the welter of personal history.