You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe

Author:Alexis Coe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

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As an adult, Washington had often proved to be a negligent son, and the busy spring and summer of 1789 were no exception. By the time Betty wrote to say that their mother wanted to know how he was doing, he had long reached New York. Mary could have read about it in the papers, but according to Betty, “she will not believe you are well until she has it from under your hand.”

Betty wasn’t just after a letter. “The doctors think if they could get some hemlock, it would be of service to her breast,” she explained.15 They hoped he could find some in New York, but Washington was too preoccupied with his own illness for several weeks to pay attention to his mother’s.

“I Am not afraid to die, and therefore I can hear the worst,” Washington reportedly told his doctor, Samuel Bard, some seven weeks after his inauguration.16 According to Bard, he suffered from the cutaneous form of anthrax, which caused a carbuncle (an infection of the soft tissue) in his upper thigh. Washington did his best to avoid eighteenth-century medicine, which often left patients worse off than they began, but was in too much pain to object to Dr. Bard’s insistence: He must drain pus out of the infected tissue. Washington was bedridden for six weeks, during which time he wrote no letters and received few guests. A slow recovery followed, allowing him just an hour a day to ride with Martha in the carriage, after it had been modified to allow him to lie down.

He eventually recovered, only to be taken ill again and again during his presidency; there was a repeat abscess in his thigh, and later, his cheek; he experienced regular fevers, inflammation of the eye, and back strains; he fell off a horse and had to use a crutch to move around. In the spring of 1790, during a flu outbreak in New York, he became infected. Although he experienced a high fever, delirium, and bloody sputum, Martha wrote that he “seemed less concerned himself as to the event than perhaps almost any other person in the United States.”17

Washington was pragmatic through it all; he had already outlived most of the men in his family, and he’d lived some of those years hard, which apparently showed. “Time has made havoc upon his face,” observed Fisher Ames, a congressman from Massachusetts, during the inauguration.18 It may have been a pained reaction to all the attention, but such comments would only become more frequent—and be made about every president who followed.

Even if Washington had managed to procure hemlock for his mother when she first asked for it, it would have made no difference. Betty’s letter arrived in July, and by August 10, 1789, Mary had stopped speaking. She died fifteen days later. The town crier rang the bell at St. George’s Episcopal Church eighty-one times: twice because she was a woman, and seventy-nine for every year she lived. Washington, by then busy with

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