Effects Of Science On The Great Awakening

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The Effects of Science on the Great Awakening
If the sciences had been quicker to develop, the Great Awakening would not have happened. This is because people were seeing change as a good thing after the rapid spread of disease, which would be preventative when science did develop. Also, the ideas of modern scientists, made people begin to think of the gap between man and God as much smaller, and that the consequence of their actions all that much greater.
The great Awakening was actually a series of revivals that took place in the American colonies spanning several years. It was a shift of religious teachings from the importance of the church to preaching of the importance of personal behavior. The changes that took place during the Great Awakening were so dramatic that those who took part in the awakening became known as the ‘New Lights’ and those who didn’t were called the ‘Old Lights’.
Settlers in the American colonies seemed to have more trouble with disease than they had planned for. They were dealing with both the diseases that they had brought with them from England and those that were Native to their new home continent. They did their best to mix the old medicines they brought with them from Europe with the new remedies to provide cures for these new diseases (Cotton). Life on the frontier was especially hard and these settlers found that in these regions survival was truly every man for himself (Matthews). In these regions there were few familiar herbs available, and not many of the herbs brought with them were capable of growing in the new terrain. These people also had the least


access to doctors as they lived so far west and their large plantations could often put several miles between themselves and any major city (Cotton).
In this time period doctors studied the ideas from ancient texts such as those written by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Dicorides and Galen. They taught that sickness...