Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [73]
Some of the civilians, however, were seasoned public health officers who brought that experience to the Medical Department. If military discipline was new to these men, the police power was not. Several of them would play leading roles in staging the overseas campaigns against smallpox. Dr. Azel Ames, who served as a brigade surgeon with the U.S. Volunteers in Puerto Rico, had founded the board of health in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Dr. George G. Groff, who would serve with Ames as a director of vaccination in Puerto Rico, had a peacetime career as professor of organic science at Bucknell University and president of the Pennsylvania State Board of Health. Like many of the older surgeons of the Regular Army, Dr. Henry F. Hoyt was a veteran of the Indian campaigns—he called himself a “redhaired Indian fighter.” But he had also served as commissioner of health for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he enforced smallpox vaccination and established a bacteriological laboratory before receiving his wartime commission as chief surgeon of the Second Division, Eighth Army Corps, bound for Manila.28
Smallpox loomed on everyone’s mind as the troops and doctors streamed into the national assembly and training camps in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, and Georgia. By the spring of 1898, the new mild type smallpox had spread across much of the South, shaping the War Department’s decisions about where to locate the encampments. C. P. Wertenbaker, dispatched to South Carolina just two days after the declaration of war, advised strongly against using smallpox-ridden Columbia as an assembly area.29
Since 1834, Army regulations had mandated that all U.S. soldiers submit to vaccination. The Volunteers had their arms scraped as they mustered into service. Army reports and soldiers’ letters home recounted the vaccine-induced fevers and inflamed arms that afflicted men in camps and aboard ships headed for the war zones. Lieutenant Colonel Hoff insisted the Army’s vaccine was sound, attributing the soldiers’ woes to the “hurry and turmoil” of the mobilization and the inexperience of the Volunteers’ medical staff. The virtue of compulsion seemed ably demonstrated by the remarkable absence of smallpox in the assembly areas, as tens of thousands of soldiers mobilized for war in the midst of an emerging regional epidemic. Among more than fifty thousand Regular Army troops, only one smallpox fatality occurred on the mainland.30
The real horror of the national encampments turned out to be typhoid. The infectious disease had haunted armies since time immemorial, earning the nickname “camp fever.”
By 1898, typhoid fever held few mysteries for Army surgeons. They knew its causative agent (Bacillus typhosus), its mode of transmission (“the transference of the excretions of an infected individual to the alimentary canals of others”), and the sanitary measures that would keep it at bay (keeping troops from fouling their own water, food, and personal effects). But the surgeons, particularly those serving with the Volunteers, proved incapable of preventing its spread. The hastily constructed camps provided ideal conditions for an epidemic: poor drainage, a dearth of pure water, and thousands of undisciplined recruits, who, disregarding the entreaties of their medical officers, preferred the nearby woods and streams to the newly dug latrines. Typhoid took hold almost everywhere.31
The camp epidemics made a deep impression on the surgeons who would soon accompany the American regiments overseas. Lieutenant Colonel Hoff witnessed the suffering up close; he may even have felt some responsibility for it. Assigned as chief surgeon with the all-Volunteer Third Corps at Camp Thomas, in Chickamauga Park, Georgia, he arrived at the camp in May 1898,