We went back to the bateau; and as we went, Doc Means shook his head. “Armies,” he muttered, half to himself, “armies was created special to encourage disease. You don’t rest good in an army, and you’re kind of scairt most of the time; and when you ain’t scairt, you’re either mad or homesick. What’s more, you’re always too hot or too cold or too wet, and there’s always some pitt-whistle of an officer making you do something disgusting, and your food’s rotten, if so be you get any food at all; and all those things together fix it so you can’t help getting took sick. Then when you’re sick, those same things fix it so medicines don’t do you no good, even when there are medicines, which there usually ain’t. The way to cure these fellers of what ails ’em is to stop the war and send ’em home. There ain’t hardly one of ’em but what would be healthy inside of a week.”

We were two hours dragging dead men to the pits and doing what we could for the sick close to us—though there was nothing we could do but admit air to their shelters: air that wouldn’t choke them with its foulness. They were from Poor’s New Hampshire regiment, and near every man in the regiment was down with smallpox—so many that when they moved on, there weren’t enough of their own men to row them, and their bateaux had to be manned out of the Pennsylvania regiments.

How any man who was sick with smallpox came alive off this island is more than I can understand. There were no medicines, and so few doctors that the camp could have been little worse off if there had been none at all. I saw only two, and in my opinion they left something to be desired. One seemed to me to be doing nothing but weeping. Another, having heard Verrieul speak enthusiastically of the abilities of Doc Means, came to enlist Doc’s assistance in caring for the sick; then wrangled with him angrily over theories of medicine.

The first question he asked Doc was where he had studied; and when Doc said he had got all his information by word of mouth, and out of almanacs and from reading Culpeper’s Herbal and a medical book by Thomas Tryon, the doctor said “Pfaugh!” in an offensive voice, adding that Tryon was a crank and a quack.

“Well,” Doc said, “maybe he is, but he’s good enough for Ben Franklin, and what’s good enough for Ben Franklin is good enough for me. Howsomever, I ain’t making no effort to be a doctor in this army. It’s a fact I brought along my Venesection Mannekin and my Almanac and my Digby’s Sympathetic Powder, but only because—–”