Annamaria on Monday
The heart-bursting truth is that amid the worst moments on
the planet good human beings can do the right and the achingly beautiful thing.
Case in point: The Quaker Doctor—John Jay Terrell
During the American Civil War, most of the fighting took
place in the State of Virginia.
Ordinarily in previous wars, the injured remained near where they fell,
treated as best as could be arranged in tents.
But with the railroad nearby, in 1861, wounded confederate soldiers were
taken to Lynchburg, where all the available spaces were turned into makeshift
hospitals.
Fate had been preparing a hero to receive them.
John Jay Terrell was born nearby in 1829, the son and
grandson of physicians. His family were
Quakers. In those days, most doctors
were trained through apprenticeship, but John decided on a formal education in
modern medicine at Emory and Henry College and then at Jefferson College in
Philadelphia—where he graduated first in his class in 1853.
As Quakers, John’s family had moved away from the
slave-holding state, but he returned to his family’s ancestral homestead after
completing his education. He had barely
settled into life back home near Lynchburg when the Civil War broke out. One would have expected a Quaker to be a
conscientious objector. He could have
paid someone to serve in his place, but he could not bring himself to put another
man in danger in his stead, so he joined the Confederate Army. Rather than waste his talents on the
battlefield, Dr. W. O. Owen, chief of staff assigned him to help the wounded.
Pest houses were common in those days, places—usually
located near or in the public cemetery—where people suffering from communicable
diseases would wallow in filth until their illness saw them off. During the Civil War, the Lynchburg Pest
House was hell. Full of soldiers
suffering from smallpox, attended by nurses who did little but guzzle the booze
meant to be stave off the pain of the suffering. You
can hardly blame them. What would it
have taken for any of us to go to work in such danger and squalor? J. J. Terrell volunteered to work there.
He waded in, armed with new ideas about health and
cleanliness from his recent formal training.
With him went a Jesuit priest, Father Gache’ and Catholic nuns of the
Daughters of Charity. John’s new fangled techniques, ridiculed by
the local medicos as Quaker fetishes, included using a thermometer, boiling
instruments. injecting medicine into the sick person, and chloroforming patients
undergoing an operation. Terrell
cleaned up the dirt, made sure the patients were kept clean and warm, painted
the interior wall of the rooms black to keep the light low and soothe their
eyes. He had their bodies oiled to cut
down on bed sores and pain.
He also vaccinated the well, using cowpox from a sick cow he
had shipped in from Maryland. In the
process, he also inoculated the local slave children.
Terrell’s methods reduced the death rate in the Pest House
from 75 to 5 percent!
After the war, John Jay Terrell returned penniless to his
ancestral home in the nearby countryside.
He practiced medicine there until he died at age 94.
His story is a tribute to the healing power of human
kindness. He is memorialized in the Pest House Museum in the Historic public cemetery in Lynchburg.
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