In the summer of 1777 a putrid, malignant dysentary [sic] swept over the town [of Shelburne, Massachusetts] with a dreadful fatality, especially among children. The disease seemed to defy all medical skill. Doct. John Long kept a record of the scenes of those terrible months. [This document may be in vault of the Shelburne Town Hall - ed.] A French doctor arrived to stay the malady, but left in three days. Sixty six died in fifty three days. It was impossible to obtain sufficient help to attend the sick and dying, & bury the dead, and gather the crops. Numbers of the men had gone to the war, and in the midst of this calamity, the drum and the fife called the militia on to the common to furnish a new quota for the army. All this was during a dark period of that great national struggle. The British General Burgoyne was just then marching down from the north towards Albany with 10,000 men besides the French & Indians, having already taken the Fort at Ticonderoga. The roar of the cannot at the Bennington battle was heard at Shelburne in those days of sickness and death. Dark and terrific must that time have appeared to this new settlement. In 1802 and 1803 the dysentary [sic] again fearfully prevailed, and cut down about seventy persons. In 1808 a new disease - the spotted fever - appeared, baffling all efforst of doctors, until a messenger on horseback went to President Fitch of Williams College and returned with a successful remedy. In 1814 the typhus fever proved fatal to some thirty persons. The 1530 deaths in Shelburne during its whole history [through 1868] makes the average annual number to be about fourteen. Three persons have committed suicide, and eight at least have been drowned. Doctors Long and Childs were the early physicians of the town; & their sons succeeded them; and the four did nearly all the business of the profession for than half a century. In later years Doctors George Bull, Constant Field, Charles M. Duncan, Dr. Cleveland, Milo M. Wilson, S. J. W. Tabor, C. Puffer, Lawson Long.