The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [28]
A few days later, the ward visitor at St. Mary’s pulled Constance aside, his face blanched, to tell her he would not be back the following day. “For I am down,” he said. When he reached out his hand, his skin burned her to the touch.
CHAPTER 5
The Destroying Angel
Dr. William Armstrong steered his carriage toward Poplar to St. Mary’s Cathedral—he heard the echo of hooves on stamped earth, the rattle of chains and buckles, the horse’s bit the accompanying percussion.
Armstrong had been appointed by Dr. Mitchell to oversee the cathedral district near his office on Alabama Street. Though he was used to seeing patients in his office with its cloth-covered rocker and red fainting chair, he had spent very little time there in the past weeks. Healthy physicians were few and far between. Paid ten dollars a day, local doctors and those who came from elsewhere could not make it from one home to the next without being stopped by crowds in the street begging for help. The City Hospital had long since filled its 125 beds, and the doctors now reverted to the days of house calls and saddlebags. Few people would have chosen the hospital over their homes anyway. In the 1870s, hospitalswere notorious for spreading disease more often than curing it. People even opted to have surgery performed at home, rather than risk infection in an operating room. Hospitals were essentially for the indigent who could not afford private physicians.
Armstrong continued to live in his own home, but many physicians of the Howard Association stayed at the Peabody Hotel, the only hotel to keep its doors open during the epidemic. After breakfast at the hotel, usually nothing more than bacon, milk and coffee, a doctor was assigned to his particular district, where as many as twenty calls would be waiting as soon as he arrived. The physicians, wearing Howard Association armbands, loaded mule carts full of provisions. The doctors carried small leather cases that held knives, scalpels, a spring-loaded bleeding lancet and a pocket watch to take the patient’s pulse. With no drugstores open, they carried leaden glass bottles of quinine and arsenic tonic for the fever, as well as vials of ethanol, morphine, caffeine and iodine. They also carried extra handkerchiefs. To identify black vomit, doctors would hold a soiled linen cloth up to the sun and watch the red edge of blood seep from the center like a crimson-colored eclipse.
Physicians reported seeing as many as 100 to 150 patients daily. Their treatments ranged from the practical to the truly bizarre, though all were remarkably similar in their ineffective-ness. Castor oil was given to force the kidneys and intestines to function once again. Sponges soaked in iced whiskey and champagne were used to bring down fevers. Laudanum was prescribed for pain. Citizens also self-medicated—gin sales were higher than ever when a rumor circulated that gin could ward off yellow fever. A doctor was quoted in the Family Physician for his treatment of the fever: The patient should sit naked, covered in blankets, on a split-cane, open-bottomed chair above a saucer of burning rum until the vapors caused the patient to faint and fall off the seat.
Dr. Robert Mitchell, however, gave his Howard doctors a specific protocol for treatment. Calomel, an irritant drug, was given to empty the bowels, followed by a mustard footbath and perspiration for twelve to sixteen hours. A sponge bath of whiskey and water followed until the temperature dropped below 102 degrees. Two ten-grain doses of quinine were given, and the patient was to be kept completely quiet—no visitors. Once the fever subsided, a bland diet of milk, limewater or chicken broth followed. No solids for ten days, nor could the patient sit up. Bedpans