Junius Brutus Stearns/Dayton Art Institute

ON THE morning of December 13, 1799, when it was snowing heavily and about 30 degrees Fahrenheit, George Washington toured his estate at Mount Vernon, Virginia on horseback. He was sixty-seven years old and in good health at that time, well enough to perform this daily ride and to supervise five farms. He had recently retired from politics, complaining that politicians had regard for “neither truth nor decency.”

The day before, he had also gone out in the wet snow. He returned home in damp clothes and, not wanting to detain guests, sat down to dinner without changing.

At dinner on the 13th, he was reportedly in good spirits but stated that his throat was sore. His secretary was concerned and suggested he take some medicine. Washington, as recounted in George Washington: A Life by Willard Sterne Randall (Henry Holt & Co, 1997), responded

“No, you know I never take anything for a cold. Let it go as it came.”

Unfortunately, Washington and his doctors, as the night and next day progressed, did not follow this non-invasive approach. If they had, the president may have lived into the 19th century. Instead, concerned about the extreme inflammation of the president’s throat, they resorted to the medical wisdom of the time. Before long, close to half the blood in Washington’s body had been drained by leeches and he was administered mercury, known now to be highly toxic, as well as other substances.

Three doctors were by his bedside, the youngest of whom, Elisha Cullen Dick, advised at one point an immediate tracheotomy to allow Washington, already considerably weakened by bloodletting, to breathe. The other doctors rejected this proposal and Dick pleaded with them to stop bleeding the president:

“He needs all his strength — bleeding will diminish it.”

The doctors again rejected Dick’s advice.

One doctor recommended a dose of mercurous chloride and a tartar emetic, which caused violent vomiting. Another doctor administered an enema. Dr. James Craik, the physician general for the United States Army, applied a toxic tonic directly on the president’s throat, which caused blistering.

To make matters worse, the doctors also swabbed his throat with a mixture of dried beetles. In addition, they instructed him to drink a blend of butter, molasses, and vinegar — which nearly suffocated him. (Source)

Things were not going well:

By late afternoon [on the 14th], after Washington’s fourth bloodletting in 12 hours, the weakened former president was struggling for air. He turned to Craik and said, “Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go; I believed from my first attack that I should not survive it; my breath can not last long.”

And it didn’t last long. He died that evening with his wife, Martha, by his bedside.

According to James Thomas Flexner in Washington: The Indispensable Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974):

Had his treatment been less debilitating, it is possible that the normally healthy Washington would have lived through this sickness. [James] Craik [his main doctor] later admitted that he should have listened to Dick and maintained that if the physicians had “taken no more blood from him, our good friend might have been alive now,” although it is by no means certain that they could have done anything about his condition. First of all, they were not sure what he suffered from: it may have been a streptococcus infection of the throat, but could have been diphtheria. Even had they diagnosed the illness correctly, they may not have had the instruments to treat him—to examine his larynx, for example. However, it is safe to say that the treatment did nothing to aid his recovery and most likely hastened his death.

The practice of bloodletting was based on the ancient idea that illness was caused by an imbalance of bodily elements known as the “four humours.” According to Dawn Lester and Dave Parker in their book What Really Makes You Ill: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong:

There has never been any scientific evidence to support the efficacy of bloodletting, despite the fact that it was used as a ‘treatment’ for more than 2,000 years and had been advocated and employed by many eminent physicians in their own practices. Although leeches remain in use in modern medicine, their purpose is to assist blood flow and prevent clots, rather than to draw large quantities of a patient’s blood.

Doctors today may look back at bloodletting and marvel at its dangers and inefficacy. But is it more dangerous than heavily sedating elderly patients in respiratory distress and placing them on mechanical ventilators, a practice during the past two years which was subsidized and encouraged by the federal government and apparently disastrous for thousands? (Some facts about ventilation of “Covid” patients can be found here.)

Are leeches really any worse than many drugs and the end-of-life “palliative care” administered today? The increasingly poor health of Americans suggests otherwise.

Certainly, Washington’s doctors had the best of intentions. As do most doctors today. That is undeniable.

The sad story of how America’s first president was unintentionally brought to a premature end by his own doctors serves as a cautionary tale. Practices uniformly accepted by the medical establishment are not always scientific or wise despite the very best of intentions.

— Comments —

A reader writes:

This forcibly reminded me of James Abraham Garfield’s lengthy medical martyrdom.  Shot by Charles Guiteau on July 2, 1881 he lingered in pain until September 19 with a wound not immediately fatal but which the practices of his physicians may have exacerbated by (among other things) probing the wound with unwashed fingers in a vain attempt to locate the bullet. One recent writer, Dr. Howard Markel, concludes that Garfield’s death was inevitable regardless of what the doctors did, but also finds “a grain of truth to the assassin Guiteau’s claim ‘the doctors killed Garfield. I just shot him.'”

However, Fred Rosen’s book Murdering the President: Alexander Graham Bell and the Race to Save James Garfield (Potomac Books, 2016) contends that Garfield’s death was due to “intentional negligence” by  Garfield’s chief physician, D. W Bliss, who refused to properly use the new metal detector invented by Alexander Graham Bell. See a brief account here.

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