A Demographic Analysis of Shaker Mortality Trends

The health of Shakers is an important and overlooked aspect of the quality of Shaker life.Their quaint popular image, which centers on crafts, music, and the immaculately restored sites open to the public today, omits certain realities of communal life.Hundreds of Believers lived in each of the Shaker communities, and the resulting crowding offered an excellent environment for the spread of certain infectious diseases.Shaker technology kept other illness at bay.Shaker-World interactions provided opportunities for epidemic disease to enter the community.The disease environment of Shaker communities presents a window on both the health status of the America outside Shakerdom and on conditions unique to Shaker communal societies.This paper combines techniques of demography and epidemiology to examine health conditions within some nineteenth century Shaker communes.It concludes that Shakers did indeed live unusually long lives; that through cleanliness and effective technology they minimized effects of the most spectacular infectious diseases of the day; and that through crowding and improper treatment, mortality from consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) was at least as high among the Shakers as it was in the most severely affected areas in the United States.The Shakers left behind an uneven variety of manuscripts and