The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [30]
Many doctors like Armstrong had served as physicians or surgeons during the Civil War, but despite the horror of that war, the yellow fever epidemic seemed much worse. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, in 1878, reported about yellow fever: “It required a much higher order of courage than to risk life on the battlefield, where patriotism, the excitement of conflict and the contagious enthusiasm of masses are a stimulus to noble deeds: these are wanting to the physician who treads wearily along the path marked out by disease and suffering . . . the moanings that ring in his ears are never drowned out by shouts of victory and triumph, and he battles with a foe insidious and unseen till the blow is struck that lays low the victim.”
As a Howard doctor, Armstrong spent all of his time on house calls. It was lonely and frightful work, for doctors never knew what they might find when they returned to a house—walls stained with black vomit, delirium, corpses, or worse, patients barely alive, alone and completely lucid. In letters to his wife, Armstrong described the despair settling on him: “I feel sometimes as if my hands were crossed and tied and that I am good for nothing, death coming in upon the sick in spite of all that I can do.
“I never was in all my life,” wrote Armstrong, “so full of sympathy and sorrow for suffering humanity . . . God grant that I may be able to administer to the sick throughout.”
In September, Armstrong went to visit a friend known as Old Sol (Dr. Soloman P. Green), who lived across the street from St. Mary’s. Green had awakened during the night feverish, alone and terrified, and no one heard his cries for help. If taken ill in the night, the doctors knew all too well that no one would find them in their homes. They knew to expect the aches of an approaching fever, the ravaging thirst, the mental decline. And the physicians knew how their bodies, like the dozens they saw each day, would be found as though poached from the inside out. The thought, alone in one’s bedroom long after midnight, would certainly terrify the most stoic doctor. As Old Sol told the story to Armstrong the next morning, he wept like a child. “I could do nothing but sympathize,” wrote Armstrong.
The sisters at St. Mary’s had already promised to find Dr. Armstrong and care for him should he fall feverish alone in the night.
As days followed nights, there was no measure of time passing, only a blurred sense of sickness and death, of too many cries for help and too few doctors and nurses. Only one change was noticeable among the doctors: the decrease in their numbers.
The cacophony of moans and cries from the ill continued in the halls of St. Mary’s. There were not enough sisters to attend, and certainly too few doctors, so only half of the cries went answered. Exhausted, the sisters promised to return to dying patients. More than once, they returned too late or the nuns themselves were found collapsed and feverish in the rooms of patients.
On the last day of August, Will Armstrong was called to St. Mary’s on an urgent request. Their dean, George Harris, was down with the fever. He had been without a physician for ten hours, so Constance called for Reverend Charles Parsons to help attend to the dean. When possible, the rules of propriety remained: Male nurses were found for male patients and females for females. Constance told Parsons what to do, how to nurse the feverish patient and together, they waited for Dr. Armstrong. Parsons would also need to take over Harris’s duties, for now the nuns would be without their priest.
It was six months since Charles Parsons had stood in full uniform on the eve of Mardi Gras and preached to his Chickasaw