1883 Smallpox
At a Crisis -- Further News from the Smallpox District
Mercer Bears the Burden of the Case -- Dr. Bee's Defense of Dr. Carr, Who Called It Chicken Pox

Yesterday Dr. Reeves received a long letter from Dr. Bee, giving further particulars of the smallpox ravages, in Mercer, Wyoming and McDowell. The letter proceeds:
The smallpox epidemic seems to have reached a crisis in Mercer and Wyoming counties. The most active measures have been adopted to "stamp out the disease" in those two counties. Mercer has, so far as we are informed, done everything that has been done in furnishing supplies, nursing and giving medical attention to the sick of this, Wyoming and McDowell counties. If the authorities of Wyoming have given any aid, it has in no way been made apparent to our board or the suffering public.
Dr. Brown and the other members of the local board may have done good work in vaccinating the people and in adopting some sort of system to prevent the disease from reaching the lower end of the county about Oceana. But we are caring for the sick in the section alluded to in Dr. Burton's letter.
The origin and present seat of the disease is about equidistant from the two county seats, Princeton and Oceana. Dr. Gooch, of Summers county, has been employed by Mercer, and to take immediate charge of and rigidly enforce the quarantine, and adopt under the advice of our local board such sanitary measures as may be deemed best. The doctor is an excellent physician and is doing good work.
He writes me that he now has nurses enough, and that in future the death rate will be much smaller than heretofore. When the scourge is ended, and we have time to look around I will give you a detailed history of the origin of this disease, with such information in regard to the peculiarities of the epidemic as may be of value in the future treatment of smallpox. It must be unusually malignant, but as to that the want of adequate medical aid and other conditions peculiar to that particular region and population may have, and doubtless has, much to do in producing the large death rate that we are pained to record.
Dr. Allen H. Carr, so often alluded to in the Register as the physician to whom the fatal mistake of the chicken pox diagnosis is credited, is not by any means the ignorant empiric that he is called. The Doctor is a regularly educated physician, but as these people positively denied having had any chance to contract smallpox, he yielded to those assurances and decided that it might be a bad type of chicken pox. Carr, like many other physicians in this region, had never treated or seen a case of smallpox, and not wishing to create a panic, adopted the chicken pox hypothesis and became a victim himself to his own too generous credulity. Such mistakes have been made, and may again be made by older and more experienced hands that Dr. Carr's.
You can rest assured that we are profoundly grateful to you for your kindly interest in behalf of our suffering people I, in common with other gentlemen here are trying to do our duty, but I feel thankful for these complimentary notices of my poor services to which you so kindly allude in your letter. Your name with our people is the very synonym of devotion to oth? duty and the cause of humanity. [22 May 1883; Wheeling Register - sub. by K. Torp]

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