“His left arm was blown off and never found”

Last month I left ship’s captain Sylvanus Lowell lying near death at the smallpox hospital in Marblehead harbor in early December 1773.

Lowell had gone to that island hospital for inoculation. But then he loaded the island’s cannon for some sort of celebration, and it had exploded, severely injuring his neck, one eye, and both arms.

I paused to fill in the background of the doctor treating patients at that hospital, Hall Jackson, and his career in amputations.

That drew me into how Dr. Jackson volunteered as a military surgeon for the New Hampshire regiments at the siege of Boston, and how he got into a feud with Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., over whose hospitals were healthier.

And then I hit the Sestercentennial of the mobbing of John Malcolm in Boston, so I had to cover that significant incident.

Meanwhile, fans of Capt. Lowell must have been on tenterhooks, wondering what would become of him.

Good news! The next status report on the patient appeared in the Essex Journal, published in Newburyport, on 26 Jan 1774:

Capt. Lowell of this town, whom we some time ago mentioned to have been terribly wounded by the discharge of a cannon at the Essex Hospital, having recovered, the cure merits notice, and does great honour to the physician who has the care of the Hospital.--

He had been inoculated but twelve days, and the small-pox was just making its appearance, when the accident happened, by which his left arm was blown off and never found, and the remaining part was amputated within four inches of his shoulder: The right hand and part of the arm were torn to pieces; and this arm was amputated just below the elbow:

The large vessels of the neck, the windpipe and the lower jawbone, from the chin to the ear, laid quite bare; and three of the upper fore teeth broken off with a piece of the jaw: The coats of the right eye pierced and its humours discharged, and the bone between the eye and the nose broken through; the other eye greatly hurt, the whole skin of the face and breast much hurt, and several shivers of bones driven into the cheeks in different places:

Besides this, he also had a wound four inches long in the inside of his thigh, which was so filled with powder that it was not discovered ’till several days after the accident.

Notwithstanding, in the short space of thirty-seven days he is so far recovered as to need no further care of a Surgeon.

Lowell remained on the island until 16 January. On that day the Marblehead mariner Ashley Bowen wrote in his journal:

This day some snow. Came from Cat Island Captain Lowell. Ditto Jackson desired him not to snowball anybody.

I’m not sure whether to read “Ditto Jackson” as “Jackson also came from the island” or as “Doctor Jackson.” That has a bearing on who made the very dark joke of telling a man with no hands left not to throw snowballs.

As Lowell returned home, there was rising fear among Marbleheaders that the hospital’s security was too lax to keep infectious clothing and people away from the larger community. That anxiety came on top of resentment at the hospital pricing inoculation out of reach of most ordinary people. For more on that controversy, see Andrew Wehrman’s “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’” in the New England Quarterly.

The night after the Essex Journal ran its article praising the skills of “the physician who has the care of the Hospital,” a score of locals went onto Cat Island and burned that hospital to the ground.

TOMORROW: What was left for Capt. Lowell.

(The picture above, courtesy of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, is Ashley Bowen’s rendering of Cat Island “Ware the Pestt House Was arected for Enocolation for Small Pox in the Year 1773.”)