Disease, War, and the Imperial State

The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years' War

Erica Charters

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226180144
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Seven Years' War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India.  In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of European states.In  Disease, War, and the Imperial State, Erica Charters demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years' War. Military medicine was a crucial component of the British war effort; it was central to both eighteenth-century scientific innovation and the moral authority of the British state. Looking beyond the traditional focus of the British state as a fiscal war-making machine, Charters uncovers an imperial state conspicuously attending to the welfare of its armed forces, investing in medical research, and responding to local public opinion.  Charters shows military medicine to be a credible scientific endeavor that was similarly responsive to local conditions and demands. Disease, War, and the Imperial State  is an engaging study of early modern warfare and statecraft, one focused on the endless and laborious task of managing manpower in the face of virulent disease in the field, political opposition at home, and the clamor of public opinion in both Britain and its colonies.

CHAPTER ONE

Wilderness Warfare, American Provincials, and Disease in North America

In North American campaigns during the Seven Years’ War, British forces found themselves struggling to maintain, and then extend, their hold on settlements and trading forts in a challenging environment. Not only did the climate seem unduly harsh, with its long, bitterly cold winters, but fighting in the immense expanses of wilderness alongside provincials (Anglo-American colonists) and against Native Americans presented British authorities with varied problems. In the first few years of the war, Britain suffered disastrous military and naval defeats. Yet by 1758, British troops and provincial regiments, supported by the Royal Navy, began winning the victories that would ensure British control of North America by the end of 1760.

Over the course of the war, British imperial military strategy showed itself to be responsive to North American environmental and colonial challenges—a crucial aspect of its success during the war.¹ Depending on colonial officials and constituents for the recruitment of provincial troops and a reliable supply of provisions, British officials negotiated with colonial authorities and tried to dampen sites of potential colonial friction. Yet the experience of warfare did strain imperial relations: colonial officials complained about British demands and resisted recruitment, while British officials in turn complained about colonists’ military inexperience and lack of vigor. Disease reinforced these imperial differences, often acting as a physical manifestation of the logistical obstacles of warfare in North America and the social differences between provincial and British regular troops.²

This chapter focuses on scurvy and smallpox in North America, two diseases that constrained and shaped British colonial military strategy during the war, examining the military, medical, and political responses to disease by British officials. Scurvy is a salient example of the logistical challenges of North American warfare, as it was common during the long winters, when no fresh provisions could be found or easily transported across large and uncharted distances. The British garrison at Quebec suffered devastating rates of scurvy in the winter of 1759–60, resulting in British defeat at the battle of Sainte-Foy in April 1760. While 58 British soldiers lost their lives at the battle on the Plains of Abraham, over 500 British soldiers died from disease between the battle on the Plains and the battle of Sainte-Foy. Thus, the history of disease, contextualized by eighteenth-century theories of scurvy, allows a reconsideration of what is the most famous battle of the Seven Years’ War: the conquest of Canada in 1759.

Smallpox highlights the social context of disease. Most likely brought from Europe by French and British troops at the opening of the war, smallpox affected provincial troops more so than British regulars, and was likewise particularly feared among colonial populations. As its spread was associated with the movement of troops, smallpox encouraged colonial resentment and resistance to British military endeavors, while also physically distinguishing between provincial and British-born troops. Moreover, contemporary medical theory posited that lifestyle and constitution predisposed some individuals to disease more than others. Thus, laziness and intemperance, for instance, were seen to encourage scurvy and smallpox. Disease thus appeared to bear out widely held beliefs about physical and temperamental differences between provincial and British soldiers.

Responses to scurvy and smallpox are here evaluated not solely through the prism of modern biomedicine, but also according to contemporary medical theory. Military and colonial records are examined for evidence of the application of eighteenth-century understandings of disease and medicine. As a result, what emerges is a vibrant network of medical observations and experimentation. Military medicine in the colonies afforded even lowly regimental surgeons the opportunity to develop medical expertise and contribute to the broader understanding of disease by leading figures such as James Lind (1716–94) and John Pringle (1707–82). This reinforces recent studies that have defended eighteenth-century British military medicine against accusations of poor or insufficient care, and that establish eighteenth-century military medicine, particularly in the colonies, as innovative and influential.³ This study reveals that medicine was an important component of military campaigns in the eighteenth century as well as a tangible demonstration of the adaptability and responsiveness of British officials to the physical and social difficulties of North American campaigns. Even though scurvy and smallpox were not always prevented, British officers were genuinely concerned with the welfare of soldiers under their command. Various preventative methods and cures for disease, informed by current medical theories and observations, were instituted by military and medical officials while on campaign in North America. These responses demonstrate not only the vast scope of resources dedicated to combating disease in colonial military operations and the expertise with which these resources were invested, but also contemporary preoccupation with disease.

This is not an overview of British operations in North America during the war; various studies offer a comprehensive view of the military operations, politics, and diplomacy of the Seven Years’ War in North America, or, as it is known in America, the French and Indian War. These studies richly detail the war’s transformative effect on colonial governments and societies, as well as on Native American political alliances, tactics, and society.⁴ By contrast, this study presents the British perspective on the war, one that was not interested in the minutiae of regional and tribal distinctions—indiscriminately grouping American colonists and colonial forces under the heading of “provincials,” and referring to various Native American groups as “Indians’—but a perspective nonetheless concerned with the long-term welfare of allied populations.

This chapter introduces the significance of disease in warfare, and demonstrates the cultural and social frameworks that shaped responses to it, while providing an overview of the structure of medical care in the British Army in the mid-eighteenth century. In doing so, it elucidates the nature of eighteenth-century warfare, which was not neatly confined to battles and combatants. As contemporaries recognized, early modern warfare took place within a broad social context and had a significant impact on civilian populations, and—particularly in colonial contexts—is best described as unlimited in its scope. Focusing on the history of soldiers’ bodies and the interpretation of disease demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between the very physicality of warfare and its conduct.

The chapter opens with a discussion of the role scurvy played in British warfare in North America during the Seven Years’ War, beginning with an overview of modern and eighteenth-century understandings of the disease. It then considers the prevalence of scurvy during North American land campaigns and the measures that British military officials adopted in response. A detailed examination of the siege of Quebec City in 1760, in which the British garrison suffered from such high rates of scurvy that it risked losing control of New France’s center of operations, offers a pertinent example of the significance of disease in warfare. The medical responses to scurvy in both the colonies and the metropole provide insight into the nature of eighteenth-century medicine in the British Army, demonstrating that colonial military medicine was an influential component of eighteenth-century medical theory. In the final section, a discussion of smallpox explains how disparate social backgrounds resulted in different rates of disease between provincials and British soldiers, exacerbating social and imperial political tensions in the British American colonies.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOTIONS OF SCURVY

We know now that scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, or ascorbic acid. It was not until the early 1910s, however, that researchers suggested a specific dietary deficiency as the cause for scurvy. With the successful isolation of vitamin C in 1932, scientists established that scurvy was indeed caused by a deficiency of that vitamin.⁵ This relatively late discovery can be partly explained by scurvy’s abnormality. Not only is a disease with such a simple cause uncommon, but most animals can synthesize their own vitamin C, so that it is impossible for them to suffer from scurvy. Thus, laboratory research, especially on rats, was often unhelpful. Human societies have also been remarkably efficient at avoiding scurvy by adapting to a variety of food environments. People who live in climates with little greenery, such as the Inuit in northern Canada, obtain their vitamin C from raw meat, and newborn children obtain it through breast milk. Certain nomadic tribes in North Africa remain scurvy-free on their traditional diet, which contains little or no vitamin C, yet develop symptoms of scurvy if they change to a nontraditional diet also lacking vitamin C.⁶

It takes very little ascorbic acid to prevent scurvy: European Union guidelines suggest thirty milligrams as a daily amount; ten milligrams, or four teaspoons of orange juice, is sufficient to avoid any health problems. A person also needs to forgo vitamin C for many days before symptoms develop. Because vitamin C is needed for cell development, tissue growth and repair, and the immune system, symptoms of its deficiency are wide-ranging. After thirty days without any vitamin C, slight skin problems appear. Resistance to infections is reduced, and one feels tired and worn-out. Small hemorrhages in out-of-the-way places, such as under the tongue, also develop. In anywhere from eleven to thirty weeks, the gums begin to soften, wounds have problems healing or reopen, and diseases such as tuberculosis can reappear. Death is usually caused by the complications from other diseases, or by heart hemorrhages brought on by the breakdown of connective internal tissue.⁷

Eighteenth-century medical texts recounted similar symptoms of scurvy: soft, spongy gums, healed wounds reopening, and general fatigue and lassitude, until sufferers became too weak to get out of bed. Death occurred when an individual tried to vigorously exert him- or herself (by getting out of bed, for example), causing internal hemorrhage. Scurvy was a disease not surprisingly associated with unusual circumstances, such as famines, sieges, long voyages, and especially sailing. In Britain, George Anson’s celebrated voyage around the world in the 1740s, though successful in terms of plunder, was also infamous at the time for the hundreds of sailors who died from scurvy.

In 1753, James Lind published his famous Treatise of the Scurvy, and dedicated it to Anson. He explained in the preface:

The subject of the following sheets is of great importance to this nation; the most powerful in her fleets, and the most flourishing in her commerce, of any in the world. Armies have been supposed to lose more of their men by sickness, than by the sword. But this observation has been much more verified in our fleets and squadrons; where the scurvy alone, during the last war, proved a more destructive enemy, and cut off more valuable lives, than the united efforts of the French and Spanish arms.⁸

Lind had served as a naval surgeon during the wars of the 1740s, and then became head physician of the Haslar Royal Naval Hospital. Using his naval and hospital experience, throughout his lifetime Lind published a number of works on the health of sailors and soldiers, becoming a famous medical figure not only in Britain but throughout Europe. His early work on scurvy ensured that Lind was also considered the leading authority on scurvy, and even today he is judged a hero in the battle against this disease.⁹ Lind’s treatise is best remembered for its account of the so-called clinical trial conducted on board the HMS Salisbury, and today he is hailed for discovering that oranges and lemons cured scurvy. Yet a careful reading of Lind’s treatise challenges this straightforward version of events. Rather than suggesting a single and simple cure for scurvy, Lind’s theory of the disease was far more complex.

In his explanation of the mechanism of the disease, Lind describes a state of health as arising from constant evacuations and consumption, which prevent the body from developing its otherwise natural descent into putrefaction and corruption:

An animal body is composed of solid and fluid parts; and these consist of such various and heterogeneous principles, as render it, of all substances, the most liable to corruption and putrefaction. . . . Hence the necessity of throwing out of the body, by different outlets, these acrimonious and putrescent juices, rendered thus unfit for the animal uses and functions, together with the abraded particles of the solids. And a daily supply of food, or fresh nourishment, is required to recruit this constant waste, both of the solid and fluid parts. Thus the bodies of all animals are in a constant state of change and renovation, by which they are preserved from death and putrefaction.¹⁰

The main evacuation so necessary to rid the body of its putrescent juices was perspiration. The Italian physiologist Sanctorius found, when weighing everything he ate and drank over a controlled period of time, as well as everything evacuated from his body, that five-eighths of everything he consumed was expelled from the body in the form of perspiration, and more specifically insensible perspiration (perspiration of which we are unaware). If one’s perspiration was blocked, then disease, in the form of putrefaction, was sure to follow.

Cold, according to Lind’s empirically grounded theory, “obstructs or diminishes insensible perspiration.”¹¹ Moist air was also to blam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Wilderness Warfare, American Provincials, and Disease in North America
• 2. The Black Vomit and the Provincial Press: The Campaigns in the West Indies
• 3. Flux, Fever, and Politics: The European Theater of War
• 4. The Royal Navy’s Western Squadron: Trials, Innovation, and Medical Efficacy
• 5. Adaptation and Hot Climates: Fighting in India
• 6. Imperial War at Home: The Welfare of French Prisoners of War
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index