The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [109]
Many fumed to Washington about unqualified doctors. Jedediah Huntington suggested, in a cruel remark, that since all the doctors did was bleed “bad blood” from patients, the army should hire local barbers instead because they worked cheaper.”16 Dr. Rush was fed up with the hospitals at Valley Forge, too. “Our hospitals crowded with six thousand sick but [only] half provided with necessaries or accommodations, and more dying in them in one month than perished in the field during the whole of the last campaign,” he wrote to Patrick Henry. And Dr. William Brown said that “a large proportion” of the men who died could have been saved if they had enough medicine and recovered under better conditions.17
One night, Dr. Waldo rushed to a hut in a vain effort to save the life of an Indian soldier. The man’s death seemed to symbolize all of the catastrophes of Valley Forge to the doctor. Waldo wrote, “He was an excellent soldier and a good natured fellow. . . . he has served his country faithfully. He has fought for those very people who disinherited his forefathers. Having finished his pilgrimage, he was discharged from the war of life and death. His memory ought to be respected more than those rich ones who supply the world with nothing better than money and vice. There the poor fellow lies, not superior now to a clod of earth, his mouth wide open, his eyes staring.”18
Rush sneered, too, that citizens were not joining the army because of its medical woes. He wrote to Horatio Gates, “The common people are too much shocked with spectacles of Continental misery ever to become Continental soldiers.”19
Some soldiers reeled from one illness to another. Leven Powell, a lieutenant colonel from Virginia, came down with the “flux,” a severe, diarrhealike bloody discharge, just before Christmas and was taken to the farm house of John Rowland, where he spent nine days recovering with other patients. The flux was followed by a bout of yellow jaundice that lasted nearly three weeks. Toward the end of his struggle with the debilitating jaundice, Powell noticed small sores and a swelling of his right eye that reduced much of his sight in that eye. A few days later he complained of severe headaches and sores that broke out on his face. His left eye then swelled up and both eyes became weak and bloodshot. He feared he would go blind. A doctor told him that he had a bad case of what was called “St. Anthony’s Fire” and treated it the best he could.20
General Washington was appalled by the medical catastrophe. “I sincerely feel for the unhappy condition of our poor fellows in the hospitals, and wish my powers to relieve them were equal to my inclination,” he wrote to Governor Livingston of New Jersey. “Our difficulties and distresses are certainly great and such as wound the feelings of humanity.”21
The commander took steps to correct the problems. Doctors who had gone home were ordered back to Valley Forge, food and clothing was sent directly to the hospitals and not just to the camp supply officers, pits were dug in which garbage and animal carcasses were buried, urination anywhere except a privy was made a crime punishable by death, officers were put in charge of new cleanliness patrols, more medicine was found in private stores throughout the country and sent to the hospitals, officers were told to make regular visits to the sick, soldiers were ordered to bathe regularly and to wash their uniforms frequently, and windows were cut into the walls of huts