The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [108]
Some weeks passed and his health improved slightly. Crosby, knowing he was needed and “desirous to see the ensuing campaign,” then changed his mind. He turned down the chance to go home to Massachusetts and sit in front of a fireplace in his warm house and eat a fine meal with his family and continued on at Valley Forge, freezing and starving with the rest of the army.13
There were so many soldiers in the dozens of hospitals that dotted the Valley Forge camp and the surrounding villages that on March 7 only 3,301 men, out of a force then estimated at 10,200, were deemed fit for duty. Medical help for wounded or sick men in the 1770s was primitive. Ineffective medicine did little good for men stricken with typhus or other diseases and could not stop raging fevers. Men in the hospitals laid in their beds and watched others shake violently under the strains of high fevers before dying. Severe arm or leg wounds suffered in battle almost always resulted in gangrene and there was no medicine to combat it. The only solution was to amputate limbs. Only a very low level anesthetic was available, if at all, and the pain of amputation—by small, crude, handheld saws—was excruciating. Men had to be strapped to wooden operating tables with sticks thrust into their mouth to mute their screams as their limbs were removed. Puddles of blood covered the operating room floors.
The mortality rates were shocking. One-third of all the soldiers sent to the makeshift army hospital in Bethlehem died there, and thirty-seven of the forty men from one Virginia regiment, along with some of their doctors. Half the two hundred forty soldiers at Lititz passed away, along with the Moravian pastor who also served as their doctor, and his five assistants. Hundreds, along with several doctors, could not survive at Yellow Springs. One-fifth of the 1,072 North Carolina soldiers died in the hospitals. Altogether, nearly twenty-five hundred soldiers died at Valley Forge, or nearly one sixth of the entire army.
Washington received letters from men who were desperately ill in his hospitals who requested permission to return to their homes so that they could spend their last days surrounded by their families. Some doctors threw up their hands in frustration because their medicines did little good. “We avoid piddling pills, powders, cordials, and all such insignificant matters whose powers are only rendered important by causing the patient to vomit up his money instead of his disease,” wrote one.14
A nasty feud between Dr. Rush and Dr. William Shippen, the head surgeon in the army, did not help matters. Rush resigned his post as physician general that winter, charging that Shippen was using hospital funds for his personal gain. Shippen was brought before a court-martial, but merely reprimanded. The result was chaos in the medical department.
Mismanagement was everywhere. Wagons full of medicine chests from Virginia bound for Valley Forge were stopped in Williamsburg and army doctors there took most of the chests to treat their own needy troops. A cask of wine sent from Albany to a camp hospital was kept in the home of a local politician for safety; he stole it. Ships thought to be about ready to land with medicine on board were seized by the British. A driver misunderstood instructions and returned home instead of proceeding to Valley Forge with a wagon full of medicine after waiting several days for a river to recede.15 Orderlies in the hospitals sometimes stole the clothing of their patients.
The procurement and transportation of supplies, whether medicine, food, or clothing, were not under the jurisdiction of the army, but inept federal administrators in York, Pennsylvania, where the Continental Congress moved when the British occupied Philadelphia, and in Lancaster. There