"Nothing to be heard from morning to night but 'Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!' " That was Dr. Lewis Beebe's vivid recollection of Brigadier General Benedict Arnold's expeditionary forces retreating from Quebec Province last month. As firsthand accounts of the debacle are gathered, it becomes increasingly clear that the expedition's most dangerous enemy was not gunfire but disease. Says Congressional Delegate John Adams of Massachusetts: "The small pox is ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians and Indians together. This was the cause of our precipitate retreat from Quebec, this the cause of our disgraces."
Even before the Quebec expedition, the small pox proved to be a menace. Boston had so many cases that the disease helped deter General George Washington from trying to fight his way into the city last spring. Said he: "If we escape the small pox in this camp and the country around about, it will be miraculous." Only after General Howe evacuated the city did Washington send in 500 of his men who had already had the disease.
The small pox is one of the oldest scourges on earth. In North America, the Colonies have already suffered more than 50 epidemics. The disease is extremely contagious, often fatal, and there is no known cure. But there is a highly controversial and dangerous treatment: inoculation. This consists of placing pus from a blister on an infected person directly into the bloodstream of a healthy one. In theory, this causes a mild form of the disease and therefore protects the inoculated person from ever catching it again. But because of the dangers, not only to the person being inoculated but to others who risk contagion, the treatment is prohibited in many colonies.
The treatment derived more than a half-century ago from the Orient and the Ottoman Empire. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople, was so impressed by the Turks' resistance to the small pox that she had her own children inoculated by the Turkish method and recommended the procedure to the royal family. King George I tried it first on six captives at Newgate Prison, then on eleven charity children. Since they survived, he had his granddaughters inoculated.