“How large the shell was”

This anecdote comes from a 17 Sept 1775 letter by Dr. Hall Jackson, tending to New Hampshire troops during the siege of Boston:

A shell the other day happening to fall in the Marsh, the fuse was extinguished;

some of our Country fellows pick’d it up, which was observed by one of our Generals (no matter for his name) who perhaps is well acquainted with the world, and mankind in general as any on the Continent, tho’ somewhat petulant in his temper; he called one of the men and asked him how large the shell was

he answered as big as a pumpkin,

pumpkins being of different sizes, it was no answer to the question;

the General dam’nd him for a pumpkin headed, Son of a Bitch, and repeated his question,

the fellow answered that he believed it would hold six quarts,

as the shell might be thicker or thinner this could not determine the bigness,

the General in a great passion demanded the diamiter of the shell from outside, to outside,

he might as well have demanded of the fellow to demonstrate the fictions of a Cone, or any other problems in Euclid,

the fellow however in great confusion made a rough guess at the General’s meaning, answered, something less than thirty inches (the shell was exactly ten).

The poor innocent fellow was order’d under guard for insulting the General, but our good natured Brigadier soon had him released.

I’m guessing the general “well acquainted with the world” was Charles Lee, and “our good natured Brigadier” was John Sullivan.

Dr. Jackson told this story to support his case against Dr. Benjamin Church’s centralized military hospitals. Soldiers from rural New Hampshire, he argued, needed to be treated by regimental surgeons who knew how to communicate with them.

“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.”)

“Breathe their Last within the walls of his Detestable General Hospital”

As I quoted yesterday, in September 1775 commanders of the northern wing of the Continental Army besieging Boston were upset with how Surgeon-General Benjamin Church was ordering sick and wounded men moved to his hospitals in Cambridge.

Gen. John Sullivan and Dr. Hall Jackson complained that there were sick people at those hospitals! Meaning men would be more likely to catch infections there than anywhere else.

In addition, the doctors looked down on New Hampshire men as country bumpkins, and Dr. Church and his assistant surgeons weren’t as skilled as Jackson himself.

Well, Jackson didn’t come right out and say that last part (Sullivan did), but on 16 September he lambasted the central army hospitals this way:

Not an Officer or Soldier [from New Hampshire] will go to the Cambridge Hospital, they had much rather provide for themselves at Mistick at any expense, or even die in Camp with their friends than be forced into a General Hospital cram’d with the sick of 25,000 Troops; and attended by strangers from polite Places, who have never been used to the inquisitiveness and impatience of poor Country People, and are in general to apt to conster their simplicity into impertinence: it is the mind of General Sullivan, and all the Officers from New Hampshire, that unless some alteration is made, another Regiment will never be raised in that Colony.

Capt. [Henry] Dearbourn, with many others, are gone to Canada, for no other reason than to avoid the Sickness of our Camp, and dread of the general Hospital.

The arts, contrivance, and hypocricy, of some of the M—u—setts Patriots is dam—a—ble to the last degree. “A Struggle for Liberty”!—good God! my Soul abhors the Idea! If methodically to kill the wounded; to starve the sick, and languishing because they cannot Diet on Salt Pork, or will not submit to be severed from their dearest friends and relations, if these (my Dear Friend) are the Characteristicks of an Army raised for the defence of Liberty, I frankly confess I have no claim to an employment in the glorious Cause.

When Jackson wrote those words, however, the army had already formally looked into the dispute. On 7 September, Gen. George Washington laid set out a formal process in his general orders:

Repeated Complaints being made by the Regimental Surgeons, that they are not allowed proper Necessaries for the Use of the sick before they become fit Objects for the General Hospital: And the Director General of the hospital complains, that contrary to the Rule of every established army, these Regimental Hospitals are more expensive than can be conceived; which plainly indicates that there is either an unpardonable Abuse on one side, or an inexcusable neglect on the other—

And Whereas the General is exceedingly desirous of having the utmost care taken of the sick (wherever placed and in every stage of their disorder) but at the same time is determin’d, not to suffer any impositions on the public;

he requires and orders, that the Brigadiers General with the commanding Officers of each Regiment in his brigade; do set as a Court of enquiry into the Causes of these Complaints, and that they summon the Director General of the hospital, and their several Regimental Surgeons before them, and have the whole matter fully investigated and reported—This enquiry to begin on the left of the Line to morrow, at the hour of ten in Genl Sullivan’s brigade.

That inquiry ended a week later with Church being cleared of all charges. Jackson’s letter was thus carrying on an argument he had already officially lost.

There must have been similar disputes in other parts of the army because Washington ordered the same sort of inquiry in Gen. William Heath’s brigade in the central part of the lines, then in the brigades on the south wing. The commander-in-chief evidently felt that this process would force everyone to an agreement.

The second inquiry likewise ended in praise for Church. But by then the surgeon-general had left the front, pleading illness. Church even sent in his resignation from Taunton. Adjutant-General Horatio Gates wrote the doctor a flattering letter urging him to come back.

Then suddenly the conflict was resolved by an outside factor: The baker Godfrey Wenwood came to Washington’s headquarters from Newport with a ciphered letter that his ex-wife had asked him to send into Boston. Under questioning, that woman, née Mary Butler, admitted she had handled the letter for her lover—Dr. Church!

The 30 September inquiry in Gen. Joseph Spencer’s brigade was called off “on account of the Indisposition of Dr Church.” That phrase in Washington’s general orders was cover for the fact that Church was under arrest in one of his hospital buildings (shown above) for secretly corresponding with the British military.

On 4 October, Sullivan wrote in triumph:

You will by this Post Receive Intelligence from head-Quarters of Dr. Church’es having been detected in holding a Treasonable Correspondence with the Enemy—his Behaviour Towards our Sick & wounded long since Convinced me that he either was void of humanity and Judgment, or that he was Determined by untimely Removals & Neglect of Duty to Let all those under his care breathe their Last within the walls of his Detestable General Hospital.

On 17 October, Dr. Hall Jackson returned to Portsmouth. Since June, he had been working with no rank or salary. The next month, New Hampshire’s provincial government recognized his service with a commission as chief surgeon for the colony’s troops and back pay.

COMING UP: Back to Capt. Sylvanus Lowell, wounded in 1773. But first, a Sestercentennial event.

“Jackson was obliged to take the knife”

Yesterday I left Pvt. William Simpson of Pennsylvania grievously wounded in the leg by a British cannon ball in late August 1775, and two of the top doctors in the American lines arguing over his care.

Dr. Hall Jackson of New Hampshire was treating the troops north of Boston in Medford/Mistick without official commission or pay.

Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., was overseeing the Continental Army’s medical wing, centered on hospitals in Cambridge.

Both doctors actually agreed that Simpson’s only hope was to have his wounded leg amputated. But Dr. Church insisted that first the man must be moved from Dr. Jackson’s hospital to the army hospital. And as Surgeon-General, Church outranked every other military surgeon.

Here’s Gen. John Sullivan’s story of what Church did next:

he went home himself—Eat his Dinner—Drank his Glass—then went to meet the wounded voluntier who, by the Loss of Blood, The Tearing and Lacerating his flesh by the Fractured Bone had become happy by growing Insensible of his pain—

Jackson had fortold this, but Church Determining to Kill the man Secundem Artem, called his Subs around him assigns each one his post, and then requests Jackson to take off the Limb—

he Refused, Informing them that the only reason was that the Man’s life could not be saved by amputating the Limb or by any other methods, & agreeable to his predictions the Man Died on the Second day.

And that wasn’t the only amputation case Sullivan said that Church’s administration had botched. He also wrote:

a man in my Brigade…was wounded in the Leg—Dr. Jackson was by—said his Leg must be taken off, but he did not dare to do it till Church was sent for—

he sent down two of his Subs, who Complimented Jackson with the Liberty of using the Saw—one of them was to cut the flesh—the other to take up the Arteries. The first failed, leaving some of the muscles untouched, & the other would not if left to himself have taken up the Arteries till the man had Bled to Death—

Jackson was obliged to take the knife from one & the needle from the other—performed the operation—Drest the man & tended him three Days—every symptom was favourable & Doubtless the man would have soon Recovered, but on the Fourth day Doctor Church sent for him & ordered him to the Hospital.

Jackson told them that the fourth being the Day on which the Inflammation was at the highest he would assuredly die if removed—he was not regarded—the man was removed & died accordingly.

Sullivan wrote those stories in early October, after Church had fallen under a shadow. The general was a bit of a hothead and a strong partisan for Dr. Jackson, so he might have slanted the stories against Church.

Back in early September, shortly after Pvt. Simpson’s death, Gen. George Washington had actually ordered inquiries to settle the disagreement about regimental hospitals versus Dr. Church’s centralized army hospitals.

TOMORROW: The results of those inquiries.

“They were hurried Volens Nolens to a general Hospital at Cambridge”

On 27 July 1775, the Continental Congress created a hospital department for its army outside Boston.

It also appointed Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., to be Director-General of that department—though he was often called the army’s Surgeon-General.

Church had impressed Congress delegates with his years of work in the Boston Patriot leadership, his genteel bearing during a visit to Philadelphia, and his renowned surgical skills.

Receiving the news in August, Church quickly began to develop hospitals in Cambridge and Roxbury. He started to insist that regimental surgeons send their worst sick and wounded to those hospitals instead of maintaining smaller hospitals near their stations.

That policy soon became a bone of contention between Church and Dr. Hall Jackson, who until then had been working as respectful colleagues.

On 5 September, Jackson wrote to New Hampshire politician John Langdon:

I had established a Hospital for General [John] Sullivan’s Brigade had near a hundred Patients for more than a month, under as good regulations as could be desired, provided with every necessity that prudence and economy would dictate. When all of a sudden they were hurried Volens Nolens [willingly or not] to a general Hospital at Cambridge without a single compliment paid either to them, or their former attendants.

Jackson was ready to return home to Portsmouth—he was a volunteer, after all, with no commission or salary. He stated:

General [Charles] Lee, General Sullivan with all the Officers and Surgeons of his Brigade, will not suffer me to hint an intention to leave them; as not a Surgeon in the whole Brigade has ever had the small Pox, or ever performed a Capital Operation. Some Officers in the Army have offered me a substitution equal to anything I would expect, but this I should dipise, their pay being little enough to support their own Commissions with Honour and decency. Gratitude to them, obliges me to continue with them, until the pleasure of the Continental Congress is known…

On 4 September, Sullivan himself had told Langdon:

I know Doctor Church complains of those Regimental Hospitals as having been very expensive, which the Regimental Surgeons Deny, & say he cannot prove the assertion. How that is I cannot say, but am very certain that good Brigade Surgeons may assist in preventing extraordinary expense as well as Doctor Church or any other person, & give great satisfaction to both Officers & Soldiers in the Army.

That conflict had grown worse after the Continental move onto Ploughed Hill on 26 August. William Simpson, a Pennsylvania rifleman, “had his Foot and Ankle shot off by a Cannon Ball as he lay behind a large Apple Tree, watching an Opportunity to Fire at the Enemy’s Advanced Guards.”

It looks like nobody expected Pvt. Simpson to live, but all agreed that his only hope was an amputation. And, as we’ve seen, Hall Jackson considered himself an expert on amputations.

According to Sullivan, “Doctor Jackson…was there, & had every thing prepared to take off the Limb—Doctor Church happened to come in—forbid him to proceed & ordered the man to be sent to the Hospital.”

TOMORROW: How the operation turned out.

“I am hurried thro’ the whole Army”

Yesterday I wrote about Dr. Hall Jackson’s career as colonial New Hampshire’s premier amputator (if he did say so himself).

Today I’m skipping ahead, past his treatment of Sylvanus Lowell’s dire injuries, to follow Jackson to the siege of Boston.

In addition to being Portsmouth’s leading apothecary, physician, surgeon, and inoculator, Dr. Jackson was a local military expert. He was a militia captain. His modern biographer, J. Worth Estes, wrote that he “helped design the defenses of Portsmouth Harbor,” though I don’t know if that was before or after the Revolutionary War.

In December 1774 Dr. Jackson reportedly led one of the militia companies that stormed Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth’s harbor, arguably the first fight of that war. That raid yielded gunpowder and cannon for the Patriots.

After the first undeniable fight of that war, in April 1775, the doctor went to Cambridge and, he wrote, “lent my assistance to the wounded.” He returned to Portsmouth with “a plan of [Adino] Paddock’s Field Pieces, Carriages, and mounted the three Brass pieces found in Jno. Warner’s Store, belonging to Col. [David?] Mason.” On the night of 30–31 May, the doctor led scores of men to the undefended battery at Jerry’s Point in New Castle and seized eight more large cannon for the Patriot cause.

In June 1775, Jackson received word of the Battle of Bunker Hill. He immediately rode down to the siege lines north of Boston, arriving thirteen hours after hearing the news and about forty-eight hours after the fight.

Jackson offered medical help to Gen. Nathaniel Folsom, then commanding the New Hampshire regiments. Later he wrote about the young regimental surgeons he found on duty:

not one of these were possessed of even a needle, or any other proper Instruments, had they been ever so well equipped, the matter would not have been much mended. I amputated several limbs and extracted many balls the first night,

the next day I was hurried to all quarters Dr. [Benjamin] Church having got notice of my being at Mistick, [he] the best Surgeon on the Continent being obliged to supply poor [Dr. Joseph] Warren’s place at the Congress forced the principal of the wounded on me . . . .

I went on with this fatigue 15 days, when a violent inflammation in my eyes forced me to return to Portsmo’. I lost only two of my patients one Col. [Thomas] Gardiner, of Cambridge wounded in his groin, the other one [James] Hutchinson a man from Amhurst [New Hampshire] whose thigh I amputated close to his body. He survived 7 days, and would have finally recovered had not the fates took exceptions to his name.

After Jackson was home about ten days, several regimental commanders stationed north of Boston wrote, asking him to return. The doctor was back on the front by mid-July, writing:

tho’ I act in capacity of Surgeon General to [Gen. John] Sullivan’s Brigade more particularly, I am hurried thro’ the whole Army. Every other day I attend Church to Waltham to dress Coll’s. [Jonathan] Brewer and [William] Buckminster, who are still languishing with the wounds they received at Bunker’s Hill.

Once in a while a person breaks out with the small Pox and are removed. Not a Surgeon in Sullivan’s Brigade has had the Disease.

I receive my authority to act from the General, but when or how much my pay will be, I know not.

Sullivan, now in charge of the New Hampshire troops, and others were trying to get Jackson some sort of official commission and salary.

TOMORROW: The Continental surgeon general.

“Doctor HALL JACKSON has had the Care of this Lad”

Yesterday we left sea captain Sylvanus Lowell near death after he was caught at the wrong end of a cannon on Cat Island in Marblehead’s harbor.

Fortunately for Lowell, that island had become a smallpox inoculation hospital, and a surgeon was nearby: Dr. Hall Jackson (1739–1797, shown here).

Jackson had trained under his father, Dr. Clement Jackson, and then in London. He normally practiced in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but traveled to the Boston area to inoculate people.

Jackson also presented himself as an expert on amputations. The 26 Feb 1768 New-Hampshire Gazette reported that he had just cut off both legs of “a young Lad of 17 Years of Age, belonging to Hampton,” who had suffered frostbite “in crossing Winnipiscokee Pond.” A week later, the same newspaper assured readers that boy was “in a fine Way of Recovery.”

The same 3 March issue then reported another case:

The Servant Boy of Mr. Gibbs…ran away from his Master, and secreted himself on board a Vessel in the Harbour in order to go off, but she not sailing so soon as was expected, he lay on board three Days & Nights, the Weather being extremly cold, he froze in such a Manner that he lost Part of both Feet immediately;

about a Week after he was seiz’d with those terrible Symptoms the Lock’d Jaw, and convulsive Cramp, he lay near three Weeks stiff and immoveable, no Force that could be apply’d would bend one Joint of his Body, nor could the Edge of the thinest Knife be forced between his Teeth:

the Nerves and Tendons of the remaining Parts of one Foot being bare, with violent and almost constant Spasms in the same Leg, it was tho’t adviseable to take it off, which gave him immediate Relief; his bad Symptoms are gone off, and he is so far recovered as to astonish every one who has seen him.———

We hear this Lad took in eighteen Days one Ounce two Drams of solid Opium, besides a large Quantity of Musk, notwithstanding which, he did not sleep one Hour in twenty-four during the whole Time.

Again, Dr. Hall Jackson cared for that boy and performed the amputations.

The Countway Library at Harvard Medical School has a letter Jackson wrote in 1771 to the father of a boy named Andrew Card, recommending that the boy’s leg be removed because of “several holes in his knee which discharge, and cause great pain.”

Andrew was actually under the care of another Portsmouth physician, Dr. Joshua Brackett (1733–1802), but Jackson offered his and his father’s surgical services free of charge. He wrote: “I believe that you would much rather trust your child under such an operation, to those, who have perform’d it fifty times, than to one who is altogether unused to the Business.” (He also asked the Cards to keep his offer secret from Brackett out of collegial courtesy.)

In the early 1770s, newspapers reported on surgeries by Dr. Hall Jackson to restore people’s sight. He felt compelled to advertise in the 13 Apr 1772 Boston Gazette that he only performed surgery on “the Cataract and contracted Iris.” Nonetheless, ocular experience was helpful in treating Capt. Lowell, who had also suffered injuries to the eye.

TOMORROW: Dr. Jackson and the New Hampshire troops.

“We have not yet heard of his being dead…”

In late 1773 and early 1774, Marblehead and surrounding towns were concerned and then convulsed with the new private smallpox hospital on Cat Island.

I haven’t written anything about the Essex Hospital because of:

• other events at that time, like the destruction of certain tea in Boston harbor.
• other events at this time, which kept me too busy to tackle more series.
• a thorough discussion of the whole episode by Andrew Wehrman in his New England Quarterly article “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’” and his book The Contagion of Liberty.

I like to add to stories and not just repeat them at length if they’ve been told well recently. So check out The Contagion of Liberty for the short, scorching life of the Marblehead smallpox hospital.

But I did ferret out details of one anecdote tangential to that story. It starts with this article in the 7 Dec 1773 Essex Gazette, published in Salem:

Last Saturday Capt. ——— Lowell of Newbury-Port, a Patient at the Essex-Hospital, in charging a Cannon, (a Four Pounder) just after its being fired, and not properly sponged, the Cartridge took Fire while he was ramming it down: By which unhappy Accident both his Arms were blown almost to Pieces, one Hand entirely carried away with the Rammer; one Eye lost, and the other very much hurt, if not ruined; and the Skin and Flesh so tore away from below his Chin, and towards one Side of his Neck, as to lay his Wind-Pipe almost bare.

As the Accident happened near the Hospital, he was immediately carried in, and Doctor [Hall] Jackson proceeded to the Amputation of both Arms, one just above, and the other below the Elbow. We have not yet heard of his being dead, but it was thought he could not live long.

An eighteenth-century cannon has to be sponged out with a thick cloth on the end of a pole after every firing, as shown above, to ensure that there are no burning embers left inside the tube.

Furthermore, during that sponging someone has to keep his thumb over the touchhole, or the person pulling out the sponge risks can suck in more air through the back of the cannon and feed those embers.

Having all embers extinguished is especially important if a person wants to fire the cannon again, inserting another cartridge of gunpowder into the tube.

If any powder catches fire and explodes while someone is working at the mouth of the tube, the person can suffer exactly the same injury that Capt. Lowell did: having his arms blown off.

My addition to this story so far is that the unfortunate captain’s first name was Sylvanus.

TOMORROW: The patient’s prognosis.