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Right now the most critical problem is the health of the Continental Army. Among the 8,000 troops who marched to Canada, more than 2,000 fell ill from the small pox. General Washington himself had the disease as a young man and insisted last May that his terrified wife Martha be inoculated —but as Commander of the Continental Army, he must respect all local statutes against the possible spread of infection through inoculation. On May 20, from his headquarters in New York, he issued an order declaring: "No person whatever, belonging to the Army, is to be inoculated for the small pox." A week later he went even further: "Any officer in the Continental Army, who shall suffer himself to be inoculated, will be cashiered and turned out of the Army ... as an enemy and traitor to his country."
These are hard words, but the continuing spread of the disease may force Washington to change his orders. For even though the spread is sometimes worsened by the haphazard inoculation of soldiers, the Army's own chief physician, John Morgan, insists that "wherever inoculation has once had a fair trial, those prejudices, that are apt to infect vulgar and weak minds, soon vanish." Thus the solution to Washington's problem may be not to forbid the treatment but to isolate and then inoculate every soldier in his Army.