Gender and the Economy of Health on the Santa Fe Trail

Correspondence surrounding the death from consumption of a New England woman on the Santa Fe Trail in 1857 demonstrates how gender roles and economic network influenced health travel and the search for healthy places in the nineteenth century United States. Women did travel seeking healing or relief from sickness - sometimes, as here, in arduous, overland trips - but in ways subtly different from male health seekers: family attachments, as well as their own health concerns, impelled and justified women in their decisions to take journeys. Yet for women as for men, decisions about health travel were also bound up with the economic considerations that shaped their families' lives

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