The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [50]
General Thomas, a physician prior to the rebellion, had gone to Canada as the American commanding general on May 1. Thomas, fiftyone, was a fierce patriot and a member of Boston’s Sons of Liberty. The doctor was a well-dressed and distinguished man. He tried to isolate the men with smallpox in hospitals, but he had also permitted many of his men to live in private homes throughout the area. They became infected and the disease moved rapidly from them to others, and then to many more. Many deserted from the army after the January 1 defeat at Quebec, some with the pox, and promptly infected anyone they encountered in the Quebec area, and those people infected other soldiers whom they met later.3 Ultimately, over five hundred soldiers would die because of the pox.
General David Wooster arrived to take command of the army from Arnold in March and by the end of the month approximately one third of the 2,505 Americans had come down with the dreaded pox. Arnold wrote that “smallpox at this juncture” might result in “the entire ruin of the army.”4 The Americans who fled when British reinforcements arrived in Quebec on May 6 left hundreds of sick, including recovering smallpox victims, in hospitals and many more, unable to travel, along the sides of roads (fortunately for them, Governor Guy Carleton ordered his men to bring them back to Quebec where hospitals were set up to house them and many were saved).
Smallpox was the scourge of the eighteenth century. Epidemics in London that arrived between 1718 and 1746 had killed tens of thousands of people. Several thousand died in similar epidemics in Geneva and Berlin in those years. Forty thousand perished in a smallpox attack in Belem, Brazil, in 1750. The 1721 epidemic that reached Boston claimed the lives of 15 percent of the population of the city.
The disease struck quickly and usually took the lives of between 10 and 15 percent of the population of a city, but sometimes claimed as many as one-third or 40 percent of the residents. Those struck suffered severe fevers, throbbing headaches, aches of the loins and limbs, fast pulses, and painful vomiting. After several days, ugly pus-filled eruptions appeared on the skin all over the body, often completely disfiguring the face. Victims’ heads often turned blue and those who did die perished within a week.
The standard procedure to prevent smallpox was diet and inoculation. Doctors prescribed ten to fourteen days of rest and a light diet, plus purging, followed by the injection of the smallpox pustules into the skin with a one-eighth-inch-wide lancet. The diet usually consisted of pudding, milk, ripe fruit, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and vegetables.5
Smallpox would break out on the skin several days later, accompanied by a fever. The patient walked about outside and drank generous amounts of very cold water to assist the virus injected into his system in fighting off the pox. The diet and purging were considered mandatory to cleanse the body for the inoculation and introduction of the virus into the system.6
Ironically, these doctors, who saved so many lives, terrified residents in nearby neighborhoods because they inoculated people, giving them smallpox to fight smallpox. They feared the introduction of the disease could infect those not immune to smallpox who lived nearby. A hospital in Boston where smallpox patients were treated was burned down by neighbors who feared those inoculated there would infect the entire city. Someone threw a bomb into the room of a man recovering from his inoculation in an attempt to kill him to prevent him from spreading the disease. Dr. Boylston, a genuine medical hero, had been frequently taunted for inoculating people; he once told friends he was concerned about his safety.7
No one, however, understood the magnitude of the crisis about to envelope the Americans stationed along Lake Champlain in forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point as well as at their camps in the Canadian villages of Sorel, at the intersection of the St. Lawrence and Richelieu Rivers,