A nameless medical hero of the Franco-Prussian war

Dr Gordon Sharp, of Leeds, has sent us the following interesting account of an American student whose devotion at the siege of Metz entitles him to a place in the Valhalla of medical heroes. “After the surrender of Metz on October 29th, 1870, it was found that ‘black typhus fever’ was raging amongst the French soldiers who had survived the siege. The Grande Place or great square of Metz was packed with railway wagons belonging to the Eastern Railway Company of France brought within the fortifications in order to save them from falling into the hands of the Germans.

During the siege these wagons had been converted into field ambulances, in which the typhus patients were placed after their removal from the hospitals. Each truck had accommodation for at least 6 patients, and as there were 320 wagons, the typhus patients must have numbered 1,800. After a certain lapse of time a detachment of German soldiers entered the Grande Place in order to remove the dead for burial. A large quantity of quicklime was brought in wagons and thrown from long-handled shovels over the corpses in the trucks. The bodies were then swung by the legs into the wagons, carted away into the fields outside the walls, and thrown promiscuously into huge trenches prepared for their reception. The soil was at once shovelled over them. ‘Tools,’ as Byron bitterly protests, ‘the broken tools which tyrants cast away.’ Among the bodies thus unceremoniously huddled into the trenches was that of a young doctor, who had volunteered to attend on the sick men in the railway wagons, and who had himself fallen a victim to the fatal malady. The pathetic story of this youth of 22, which I afterwards heard from my friend Whitwell, who had it from what he considered to be a reliable source, deserves mention as a remarkable instance of magnanimous self-sacrifice and courageous devotion to duty. He was a medical student of American nationality, unknown to me even by name. He had served in the French army as a surgeon throughout the campaign, and had been shut up with it during the siege of Metz. (BMJ 1902;i:539)