Leavell, B S. “Thomas Jefferson and smallpox vaccination.” Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association vol. 88 (1977): 119-27 and a few notes

January 14, 2024
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Little Turtle, mentioned in the main article, suffered gout and rheumatism before he died in 1812

Wikipedia says Little Turtle, who also met Washington and Adams, made two trips to Washington, D.C., in 1801–02 and 1809–09 to meet with President Jefferson. Little Turtle died on July 14, 1812, and had suffered from gout and rheumatism for some time. He was honored with a military-style funeral with full military honors at Fort Wayne.

The three presidents mentioned in the original article as having dealt with inoculators, more or less, and their families

Washington’s mass inoculation of army (and his wife)

Washington, who suffered smallpox as a teenager, strongly believed in the effectiveness of inoculation and persuaded his wife to undergo the procedure in 1776 even as he forbade his troops from being inoculated, National Geographic reported. 

He initially ordered that no one in the army be inoculated, which was done by infecting them with a less-deadly form of smallpox, because he didn’t want to risk debilitating his men and leaving them vulnerable to a British attack while they recovered. 

At some point, he ordered new recruits inoculated. George Washington thus created a mandated system of inoculating soldiers.

  • O’Rourke, Ciara, Fact-check: Did George Washington order the Continental Army to vaccinate against smallpox? Austin American-Statesman, August 2021

One website says between 25,000 and 70,000 American Patriots died during active military service and of those, approximately 6,800 were killed in battle, while at least 17,000 died from disease (mostly prisoners of war in the prison ships in New York Harbor.) Another website says 4 out of 10 soldiers died of smallpox. And another website says that for every soldier who fell to the British, ten died from some sort of disease. The last website has a slightly different timeline for the mass inoculations or maybe just a few more details…it’s the same website, after all.

  • https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/disease-in-the-revolutionary-war/
Research: Revolutionary War

George Washington died of throat infection in 1799 and Martha Washington suffered “bilious fever” before she died in 1802

George Washington died of a severe throat infection on December 14, 1799 at the age of 67. Wikipedia says Washington was in poor health during his first term as President and planned to retire but didn’t.

On December 12, 1799, Washington inspected his farms on horseback. He returned home late and had guests for dinner, sitting down for the meal without changing his damp clothes from the inclement weather of the day. He had a sore throat the next day but was well enough to mark trees for cutting. That evening, Washington complained of chest congestion. The next morning, however, he awoke to an inflamed throat and difficulty breathing. He ordered estate overseer George Rawlins to remove nearly a pint of his blood; bloodletting was a common practice of the time. His family summoned doctors James Craik, Gustavus Richard Brown, and Elisha C. Dick. A fourth doctor, William Thornton, arrived some hours after Washington died. Brown initially believed Washington had quinsy; Dick thought the condition was a more serious “violent inflammation of the throat”. They continued the process of bloodletting to approximately five pints, but Washington’s condition deteriorated further. Dick proposed a tracheotomy, but the other physicians were not familiar with that procedure and disapproved. Washington instructed Brown and Dick to leave the room, while he assured Craik, “Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.” On his deathbed, out of fear of being entombed alive, he instructed his private secretary Tobias Lear to wait three days before his burial.

Another website says Thornton, who arrived after Washington died, wanted to revive him by warming him slowly and tracheotomy/artificial respiration and lamb’s blood but nobody knew what he was talking about. That’s the same Thornton who ran the patent office until he died and designed the Capitol and ran a gold mining company among other things.

The weather was very cold, & he [Washington] remained in a frozen state, for several Days. I proposed to attempt his restoration, in the following manner. First to thaw him in cold water, then to lay him in blankets & by degrees & by friction to give him warmth, and to put into activity the minute blood vessels, at the same time to open a passage to the Lungs by the Trachaea, and to inflate them with air, to produce an artificial respiration, and to transfuse blood into him from a lamb. If these means had been resorted to & had failed all that could be done would have been done, but I was not seconded in this proposal; for it was deemed unavailing. I reasoned thus. He died by the loss of blood & the want of air. Restore these with the heat that had subsequently been deducted, and as the organization was in every respect perfect, there was no doubt in my mind that his restoration was possible.

Thompson, Mary, Death Defied – Dr. Thornton’s Radical Idea of Bringing George Washington Back To Life, George Washington’s Mount Vernon website. mountvernon.org

Washington’s illness and the immediate cause of his death have been subjects of debate since his death. The published account of doctors Craik and Brown stated that his symptoms were consistent with cynanche trachealis, a term then used to describe severe inflammation of the upper windpipe, including quinsy. Accusations have persisted since Washington’s death concerning medical malpractice. Modern medical authors have concluded that he likely died from severe epiglottitis complicated by the treatments, including multiple doses of calomel, a purgative, and extensive bloodletting which almost certainly caused hypovolemic shock. The internet suggests Calomel, along with many other things, has been used for embalming.

Martha Washington’s health declined after her husband’s death. Early in May of 1802, Martha Washington suffered a stomach ailment that at the time was called “bilious fever.” She died on May 22 at the age of 70, two and a half years after the death of her husband. Together they raised her children from an earlier marriage and grandchildren but Washington fathered no children according to the internet.

Bilious fever was a medical diagnosis of fever associated with excessive bile or bilirubin in the blood stream and tissues, causing jaundice (a yellow color in the skin or sclera of the eye). The most common cause was malaria. Viral hepatitis and bacterial infections of the blood stream (sepsis) may have caused a few of the deaths reported as bilious fever. The term is obsolete and no longer used, but was used by medical practitioners in the 18th and 19th centuries for any fever that exhibited the symptom of nausea or vomiting in addition to an increase in internal body temperature and strong diarrhea, which were thought to arise from disorders of bile, the two types of which were two of the four humours of traditional Galenic medicine. It was often cited as a cause on death certificates. United States President Abraham Lincoln‘s son William Wallace Lincoln was said to have died from bilious fever. Modern diagnoses for the same symptoms would include a wide range of conditions and infections.[citation needed]

  • Douglas C. Heiner, Evan L. Ivie and Teresa Lovell Whitehead, “Medical Terms Used by Saints in Nauvoo and Winter Quarters, 1839–48”, in Religious Educator, 10, no. 3 (2009): 151–162.
  • George W. Givens, “Language of the Mormon Pioneers”, Bonneville Books (2003), p. 19.

Thomas Jefferson suffered rheumatism with intestinal and urinary disorders before he died in 1826

Thomas Jefferson’s health began to deteriorate in July 1825, due to a combination of rheumatism from arm and wrist injuries, and intestinal and urinary disorders (another Wikipedia page lists uremia). He died on July 4, 1826.

His wife, Martha Jefferson died years earlier in 1782 at age 33. There is no exact cause of death to be found, only mention that she had a very large baby several months earlier (16 pounds which I think indicates some kind of metabolic disorder). That baby, daughter Lucy Elizabeth, died at the age of 2 of whooping cough. The same source for that information says only two daughters, Martha (1772 – 1836) and Mary (1778 – 1804), lived past the age of 25. Thomas and Martha Jefferson had six children, and two Lucy Elizabeths who died very young, according to Wikipedia. Of the surviving daughters, Mary had three children but only son Francis W. Eppes survived childhood. Like her mother, Maria died months after birthing her last child. Martha, their eldest daughter, had 12 children and died in 1836, at the age of 64. I did not find a cause of death but I don’t think it was childbirth. Wikipedia says she had more children than any daughter of a President. In contrast to her parents and sister, each of whom had most of their children die in childhood, eleven of the Randolphs’ children survived to adulthood.

John Adams, who maybe blew off inoculation guy in the main article, but had his family inoculated (repeatedly in at least some instances), died of a heart attack at age 90 on the same day that Jefferson died.

John Adam’s wife, Abigail Adams, was ill during her final years and died in 1818, age 73, of typhoid fever.) They had six children of which two died very young (one stillborn). Their eldest daughter, “Nabby,” died of breast cancer at or near the age of 48. One of their sons was also a President and another son, Charles, died at 30 from “cirrhosis” (although a letter from his mother mentions “dropsy of the chest” or pleurisy. Wikipedia says when Charles was a child, a smallpox epidemic broke out, killing many. Charles and his family were inoculated for the disease. He and his younger brother Thomas were not showing symptoms, so they both had the procedure done a few more times. His mother, Abigail Adams, his younger brother Thomas and older brother John Quincy had mild symptoms, but Charles and his older sister Nabby were both very sick, though both recovered within weeks. Wikipedia says son Thomas was plagued by rheumatism throughout his life, beginning in childhood, and also suffered depression or melancholy and maybe alcohol and gambling problems before he died at the age of 59. In 1846, son John Quincy Adams, by then a 78-year-old former president suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and from which he made a full recovery, resuming his duties in Congress. 1848, he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died two days later…which is another strange tale and one for another day.

Rheumatism or rheumatic disorders are conditions causing chronic, often intermittent pain affecting the joints or connective tissue. Rheumatism does not designate any specific disorder, but covers at least 200 different conditions, including arthritis and “non-articular rheumatism”, also known as “regional pain syndrome” or “soft tissue rheumatism”. There is a close overlap between the term soft tissue disorder and rheumatism. Sometimes the term “soft tissue rheumatic disorders” is used to describe these conditions. The term “Rheumatic Diseases” is used in MeSH to refer to connective tissue disorders. The branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis and therapy of rheumatism is called rheumatology. Many rheumatic disorders of chronic, intermittent pain (including joint pain, neck pain or back pain) have historically been caused by infectious diseases. Their etiology was unknown until the 20th century and not treatable. Postinfectious arthritis, also known as reactive arthritis, and rheumatic fever are other examples.

In the United States, major rheumatic disorders are divided into 10 major categories based on the nomenclature and classification proposed by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) in 1983.

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