The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [106]
No one in the army seemed happy to be at Valley Forge that winter. A Massachusetts army surgeon, Dr. Albigence Waldo, may have put it best, and with a medical double-meaning, when he scribbled in his diary about his arrival there, “A pox on my bad luck.”4
Ironically, it was not the inclement weather that would be a major obstacle to the survival of the army. The winter, in fact, was relatively mild despite six snowstorms, and many soldiers even referred to the weather on most days as “pleasant.”5 The real dangers were the lack of food and clothing, plus primitive medical care for men crammed into every usable building that the army could find and turn into temporary hospitals.
Elijah Fisher’s commanding officer had many sick men under his care in addition to Elijah. Packed tightly against each other in a wagon, they were sent to one of the temporary hospitals at Reading, a town northwest of Valley Forge. The hospital there was full, however. Fisher, his kidney pain growing worse daily, was then dispatched in another crowded wagon down uneven dirt roadways to a second hospital in the tiny village of Ephrata. That hospital was also full. A doctor explained to the men that just about all of the hospitals were overflowing with sick soldiers and they had nowhere to put all of the ill troops who arrived daily. Fisher and another man were told to fend for themselves for care and shelter; there was nothing the army could do for them.
The pair walked several miles through the isolated farmlands until they found a local farmer, a Mr. Miller, who agreed to let them recover in one of the bedrooms in his small home. Fisher had developed a bad cold from the snowstorms and suffered from a lack of food and the long journey by wagon. He contracted the putrid fever again on January 20, 1778, while at Miller’s home. It was, he noted, “a severe fit of sickness,” and he had to be carried out of the farmhouse, placed in the back of a wooden horse-drawn cart and driven to a hospital. Now, barely able to move from his high fever, his health grave, he was carried from the cart and put in a bed in one of the overcrowded medical facilities.
Fisher was placed in a large open ward with dozens of other men with the putrid fever, dysentery, and other ailments and became even sicker. Men in the ward began to die shortly after Fisher arrived, their bodies carried out to be replaced by other sick men in their beds within minutes—without the sheets being changed and the stench of death fouling the air. Elijah Fisher, fighting for his life, found himself in the center of an unfolding medical tragedy.
The army had many sick and wounded men from the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and men with diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Army hospital department officials asked ministers in the small villages that surrounded the camp to give them permission to turn their churches into hospitals for the winter. The army simply commandeered those belonging to ministers who objected. Army doctors soon set up hospitals in other buildings too, including linen mills, general stores, courthouses, pottery shops, farmhouses, barns, stables, and a few popular taverns. Even the single men’s residence hall run by the Moravian religion at Bethlehem, Brethren House, was turned into a hospital. When those havens reached capacity, carpenters speedily erected Washington Hall, a three-story-high wooden structure with nine foot wide porches that housed thirteen hundred patients, becoming at once one of the largest medical centers in the nation.
The weather, although never overly harsh, was wildly erratic, with temperatures soaring from below freezing to over fifty degrees within twenty-four hours while balmy afternoons were followed by evening snowstorms.