Photo By Sgt. 1st Class James McGuire | Lt. Col. John Passehl, Wyoming Army National Guard Medical Detachment preventative...... read more read more
Wyoming Army National Guard’s Medical Detachment saw Fort Laramie as a good place to look back at medical history in the area, take a tour, and to honor its own during several ceremonies near the end of its annual training.
Fort Laramie National Historic Site started out as a fur trading site in 1834, and was bought by the Army in 1849 as part of a plan to establish a military presence along the emigrant trails. It grew to become the principle military outpost on the northern plains as well as the primary hub for transportation and communications in the Rocky Mountain region. The post was abandoned and sold at public auction in 1890. It became part of the National Park System in 1938.
“There isn’t much recorded information about healthcare,” company commander, Maj. Steven Gienapp, told his assembled unit at the start of the staff ride.
“But that’s probably because there wasn’t a lot of healthcare going on here.”
Gienapp was the first of several Med Det soldiers to share their research on the site and medical history of the era during training sessions with their colleagues.
Additional training came from park guide Will Hunziger, a local emergency medical technician, and medical history enthusiast, who shared many stories of medical care at the fort.
State Deputy Surgeon Karloyn Gafford said the group had no idea it would get extra lessons on health history, but she said afterward, “It was awesome.”
Hunziger said he was thrilled to have the opportunity to share his knowledge with a receptive audience.
“As part of my EMT training we had to study a little bit about the history of medicine. I got more and more interested in it, but it’s a subject no one likes to talk about out here. So I started studying it in more detail for my own knowledge. I tried to do it with other groups, but the greater majority of the civilians and our visitors are not as interested in it as I am, and as for the little children, it’s very crude and more graphic than some can handle.”
Not the case for this audience of Army medics, doctors and surgeons.
In Fort Laramie’s heyday, disease was rampant due to many conditions considered unacceptable by today’s standards. Soldiers were ordered to take a bath at least once a week during the summer and at least once a month during the winter. Windows in the infantry barracks were ordered to be left open year-round as soldiers shared twin beds in crowded quarters.
Army recruits were required to have just four teeth, according to Hunziger.
“Two on top and two on the bottom,” he explained. “That was so they could load a musket.”
Scurvy was a big problem for soldiers of the day according to Capt. Donnelle DeMaio, who addressed the topic in front of the bakery building. She said the standard cure for the malady that caused mouth infections and teeth to fall out was pickles and vinegar.
Hunziger added that formula could not be transported this far West, and the Fort Laramie cure became prickly pear cactus with the spine removed, soaked in vinegar and administered with a shot of whiskey. Each soldier was ordered to take the cure every day.
Medicine was not the only thing that didn’t travel well to the outpost. Food was generally rotten by the time it was served. The soldiers’ daily diet consisted of a pound of meat, a pound of vegetables and 18 ounces of flour, according to Hunziger. He said the raisin bread, baked at the fort bakery, was at the top of the list of favorite foods.
“However there is no record of a shipment of raisins to Fort Laramie, so there’s no telling what the raisins may have been,” he added with a snicker. “The Army solution to pollution was dilution. If you couldn’t see it, it couldn’t hurt you.”
Lt. Col. John Passehl addressed what Hunziger alluded to at the ruins of the general sink, or latrine. Dysentery and cholera were common due to fecal matter in the water.
“What you’d want to do is boil the water before you drank or cooked with it,” Passehl explained, “but I don’t think many knew about that.”
Sanitation was upgraded in the 1880s, but human waste still journeyed just a few yards from a receptacle to the Laramie River as well as from animals and people upstream.
Passehl shared statistics of how soldiers died during the period. During the Mexican War from 1846-1848, he said 1,500 were killed in battle and almost 11,000 died by disease.
During the Civil War, he continued, the range was almost 65 per 1,000 died from disease. Forty-four thousand died from dysentery and 4,200 died from measles. By the 1880s, death from disease was lowered to seven per 1,000.
He said it’s estimated that 32,000 people died from cholera while travelling along the Oregon Trail.
Capt. Stacy York got a laugh when she started her talk on mental health with the statement, “there was no mental health.”
York mentioned Dorothea Dix, the superintendent for Army nurses during the Civil War, and the person widely noted for spearheading the country’s efforts to address mental health issues, including the first asylums. Her efforts were primarily focused in the eastern United States, but according to York, “it was in the 1860s that we started to call PTSD something, and we called that ‘soldier’s heart,’ or ‘nostalgia.’”
She went on to list the terms for post traumatic stress used throughout our history.
“In World War I, it was called ‘shell shock’ and in World War II ‘combat fatigue.’”
Lt. Col. Marshall Kohr, state surgeon, gave a lesson on veterinary medicine, a role relegated to the noncommissioned officer corps until the turn of the century.
“It all followed horse-shoers. Without the horse’s feet being sound, you had no horse,” he explained.
“In the 1790s, Congress authorized every cavalry troop unit to have a farrier. By 1836 that farrier got to be known as the veterinary surgeon, but there was no formal education at all.”
By the 1860s, the lead veterinarian held the rank of sergeant major. Kohr said it wasn’t until 1881 that the veterinarian surgeon had to receive formal training.
Hunziger talked about post surgeons, who were feared by the local native population, which noticed how many soldiers died at their hands, and were widely mistrusted by the soldiers under their care.
One story, related by Hunziger while standing in front of the post surgeon’s residence, involved a young soldier with a tumor that slowly spread from above his eye. It grew to cover most of one side of his head. The post surgeon did not know what the growth was, and tried to remove it for further study. The soldier died during the operation and the surgeon subsequently put the removed tissue in a jar, and sent it back East.
“The jar was rediscovered in 1977, in the Smithsonian Institute,” Hunziger continued. “They got curious what the lump was and they took a biopsy of it, and discovered it was cancer. It was the first cancerous polyp to have ever been successfully and completely removed from the human body. Given successful is in the eyes of the beholder.”
Maj. Joanie Deatrich, physician, made it clear to her colleagues that their predecessors in the 1800s were just as prone to disease as the people they were charged to care for. She also noted that doctors came into the Army equivalent to first lieutenants. They were assistant surgeons for three to five years and then became captains.
“If they survived, they became the surgeon and moved up through the ranks,” Deatrich explained.
Next time you’re complaining at an hours-long military physical, consider what it was like to be a soldier in the 1800s.
| Date Taken: | 04.07.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 04.07.2016 18:36 |
| Story ID: | 194745 |
| Location: | FORT LARAMIE, WY, US |
| Web Views: | 109 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Med Det gets a taste of old medicine, by SFC James McGuire, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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