Warrior Woman by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

Author:JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307417688
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Justin was the nearest thing Fort Randolph had to a doctor, and he felt miserably inadequate. He had studied Dr. Thatcher’s recently published broadside on how to manage a community in a smallpox epidemic, and had remembered as much of it as he could. But he had virtually no medicine on hand, few instruments or supplies, and no one with the knowledge or intestinal fortitude to help him care for the wretches. What he did have was a strong stomach, sympathy, and experience.

When a soldier wailed that he was on fire, or started thrashing and flailing his arms because he couldn’t stand the itching any longer, Justin knew how he felt. He could remember, from the illness in his childhood, the flaming fever and the maddening, scalding itch. As long ago as that had been, he could feel it all.

The miseries of smallpox were attributed to a violent change in the blood: the first few days of fever because the blood was boiling in the veins to purify itself, then two weeks of raw, itching misery as the separated poison came out through the skin everywhere by way of the pustules. That much he remembered from Dr. Thatcher’s paper, so he could, at least vaguely, follow a sufferer’s progress through the ordeal.

What Justin wasn’t prepared for was the awful visible ravages. He had not seen it when he had it, because his eyes had been swollen and crusted shut, his hands bound to his sides so he wouldn’t scratch himself bloody with his fingernails, and he had not been permitted to see himself in a mirror until all his sores had dried and healed. He remembered rags being carried away from his bed soaked red from gushing nosebleeds, and that was about all he could remember of all the sights of it: the red rags.

But these men lying in misery could look over and see, on men lying two feet away, the ravages that they felt ruining their own faces. Their despair as they imagined their own appearances, he thought, must be as terrible as their physical torment. Passing through the stinking room, carrying them drinking water or gruel, gathering their filthy, blood-and-pus-stained bedding to be burned, he was often stopped by a plucking at his sleeve and asked in one whimpering, groaning voice or another:

“Is it bad? How do I look, Case?”

“Tell me, please . . . will I be ruint?”

He replied each time: “You should come out no worse than I. Would that be too much to bear?”

More likely, he knew, they would come out much worse, even those who would live. Of all the medicines needed for the various stages of the disease, he had virtually none: no mallow nor myrrh for the steams to loosen lungs, no garlic for the soles of their feet, no oil of almond or pomatum to make liniment, no paregorics for pain or phrensy, not enough nitre, no salt of wormwood, no Peruvian bark for the fevers, no saffron or asafoetida for thinning the fluid humors, and nothing but plain mustard-seed and vinegar to induce salivation.

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