“Hmph,” Cochran replied, drawing on his pipe. “We don’t need any help with that. Not in this army.”
“The boy has heard of Dr. Sutton, too.” Dr. Otto blinked like one of the owls that roosted in their barn in Hadley.
“Is that so?” Cochran’s tone was speculative. “Well, then. Let’s see if he knows something more useful than one of Dr. Rush’s extreme cures. If your patient was complaining of rheumatism and pain in the joints, how would you induce a sweat, boy?”
More questions. Marcus would rather be back among the Associators than be grilled and scolded like a schoolboy by the army surgeons.
“I’d have him examined by a committee of medical officers, Dr. Cochran,” Marcus retorted. “And the name is Mr. Chauncey, if you please.”
Cochran bellowed with laughter.
“What do you think, Dr. Cochran? Did I not find us a suitable replacement for that frightened young man who ran off at Princeton?” Otto asked.
“Aye. He’ll do.” Cochran tamped down on the tobacco in his pipe and slipped it into his pocket. “Welcome to the army’s medical corps, Doc—or whatever your name is.”
For the second time in his short life, Marcus shed one identity and adopted another.
* * *
—
TIME PASSED DIFFERENTLY in the medical corps than it had on the farm in Hadley (where nothing seemed to change except the seasons), or in his life as a fugitive (where every day was different), or the brief period among the Associators (when time passed so quickly that you didn’t have the opportunity to think). In the army’s temporary hospital in Morristown, time passed in a never-ending stream of wounds and illnesses that flowed among tables and cots, crates of bandages, and boxes of medicines. No sooner did a new patient arrive than a former patient left. Some left in pine boxes, destined for the graveyard dug on the outskirts of town. The more fortunate were sent home to convalesce from broken limbs and gunshot wounds or cases of dysentery. Others languished on the wards, poorly fed and poorly housed, unable to die, yet equally unable to heal.
As the newest recruit, Marcus had first been posted to the part of the hospital reserved for men with minor injuries and ailments. There his jobs were menial, requiring no medical knowledge whatsoever. His duties did provide a way for him to learn the rhythms of this new environment and to develop his skills. Marcus was learning how to diagnose patients by carefully watching their restless limbs, the pace of their breathing as they dreamed, and the spots of color that often appeared in the middle of the night and indicated that infection was taking root in the body.
The moonlit hours also provided Marcus with an opportunity to eavesdrop on the senior medical officers, who would gather by the ancient, inefficient stove to talk when the wards were quiet, their patients had sunk into whatever troubled sleep their injuries allowed, and only a skeleton crew of low-ranking surgeons’ mates like Marcus were present.
Cochran was smoking his pipe—something he did whenever he had an opportunity, even in the midst of a surgical procedure. Otto was rocking slowly in a chair with uneven runners, which made him look like he was riding a lame hobbyhorse.
“If we are to remain at Morristown, there must be proper housing, with latrines dug farther away from the soldiers,” Dr. Otto said. “Dysentery and typhus are more deadly than any British bullet.”
“Watery bowels, like the itch, are fixtures of army life. The smallpox, on the other hand . . .” Cochran trailed off into silence. He puffed on his pipe, the smoke wreathing his head. “We will have to inoculate them all, Bodo—every last one of them—or the whole army will be dead by the spring thaw.”
“There is nothing quick in army life, except for retreats,” Dr. Otto observed.
Marcus snorted in agreement, then tried to cover it up with a fit of coughing.
“We are aware that you can hear us, Mr. Doc,” Otto said sharply. “You are like one of the Big Man’s dogs, always watching and listening. But these are good traits in a doctor, so we let you do it.”
“Washington tells me that I will soon to go into Pennsylvania to open a hospital there. But if the general agrees to inoculate the entire army, as we hope, the burden will fall largely on your shoulders at Trenton, Bodo,” Dr. Cochran said, returning to their conversation.
“Das ist mir Wurst, my friend,” Otto replied. “I have my sons to help—unless you wish to take them with you instead.”
All three of Dr. Otto’s sons were medical men, carefully trained by their father to treat a variety of common ailments as well as undertake surgical procedures. They could concoct medicines, suture wounds, and diagnose patient complaints. Marcus had seen them working in the wards, following their father like a flock of devoted chicks, and had been amazed by their quiet competence in the face of the most gruesome injuries.
“I thank you, Bodo, but my staff did not abandon their patients and go home, as so many others did. I am well served, at present.” Cochran angled his head in Marcus’s direction. “What will you do with him?”
“Take him to Trenton, of course, and see if we can make him a doctor in truth as well as in name,” Dr. Otto replied.
* * *
—
MARCUS HAD THOUGHT NEVER to see Trenton again. He had nearly frozen to death there, waiting to cross the Delaware River with the rest of Washington’s troops during the dark days before Christmas when all had seemed lost.
Trenton was a very different place now where, with utmost secrecy and under direct orders from General Washington, Dr. Otto and his staff were inoculating the entire Continental army.
These days, Marcus’s pockets were filled with spools of thread and scalpels rather than ammunition and fuses. Dr. Otto had definite ideas about cleanliness, and the scalpels were boiled in a mixture of vinegar and soap each night. Once a piece of thread was used, it was put into a shallow basin, the contents tossed into the stoves and burned at the end of each day. To keep their clothes from harboring the infection, all of the soldiers were stripped naked and wrapped in blankets. Mrs. Dolly, that indispensable member of Dr. Otto’s staff, had come to Trenton along with all three of Otto’s sons, his medicine chest, and the laundress’s seemingly bottomless iron cauldrons. It was she who had the job of washing the threadbare clothes and (if possible) returning them to the soldiers once they recovered from the pox.
The Trenton barracks housed men from every part of the colonies, all of them undergoing some form of treatment. Southerners with their soft drawls were bedded down next to fast-talking New Yorkers and long-voweled New Englanders. Marcus heard many a soldier’s story on those long nights when he was cleaning up after the men. Some were younger than fifteen and had signed up for service in place of an older man who didn’t want to go to war. Some were hardened veterans who told harrowing tales of their previous service to while away the hours of confinement as they waited for the pox to take hold.
All of the men—young and old, Southerner and New Englander alike—were anxious about inoculation. Dr. Otto was a good teacher, and patiently explained the process and why General Washington had ordered that the whole army undergo the procedure.
These explanations might have been medically sound, but they did little to ease the soldiers’ minds. As the smallpox spread, fear grew alongside it. While many of the Continental soldiers knew of at least one person who had undergone inoculation and survived, most also knew someone who hadn’t been so fortunate. Dr. Otto kept careful records of the soldiers he inoculated, noting how the fever progressed in each, how severely they contracted the smallpox, and whether they lived or died. If a soldier refused to be inoculated, Dr. Otto shared his accounts of successful inoculations. If that didn’t convince the soldier, he barked that he was following General Washington’s orders.