“I am writing this letter from the camp of the 7th US Cavalry with two troops of which I have been out on a practice march since Jan’y 13th. . . . We are now in our third week and on our way home and we hope to reach Havana in about five days. I have a fine little horse that I have had for about 6 months and he is standing the march splendidly.”
These words Dr. Freeman Allen wrote from Cuba to future wife Mary Ethel Gibson in January 1901. The doctor had been in Cuba for a year by that point, hired on contract by the US Army as acting assistant surgeon in western Cuba. Altogether, the young army doctor spent fourteen months on the island as part of the American occupation force in the years after the Spanish-American War (Feb.–Dec. 1898).
Soon after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1899, Dr. Allen received an officer’s commission as a first lieutenant, arriving in Cuba in January 1900. Lt. Allen excelled in his role as acting assistant surgeon, tending to the care of the men under his charge and performing occasional operations. He wrote of these experiences to Mary Ethel, documenting his life and work in an occupied island nation. Sadly, we do not have Mary Ethel’s responses in our collection, but Dr. Allen’s letters nonetheless sketch an interesting and exciting picture of his brief career as a contract surgeon in Cuba.
For his first major assignment, the army appointed Lt. Allen to the staff of General Fitzhugh Lee, former Confederate general and then commander of the 7th Army Corps. As a medical officer, Lt. Allen was entitled to both live and work in Lee’s headquarters, a large marble mansion known locally as Lee’s Palace in Quemados, Cuba. And from his letters it is apparent he enjoyed his time there.
While he wrote little to Mary Ethel about his professional responsibilities as a medical officer in Lee’s Palace, Lt. Allen had much to say about his social life when he was off duty. “There is quite a society, . . . and there are dances all the time to which I go or used [to], when they were more frequent.” Besides attending social engagements, he also seems to have been amused by the general’s daughters who lived at the palace. Describing them as “pretty but utterly extraordinary” young ladies, Lt. Allen was taken by the amount of attention they expected from men. “They consider that when they meet a man he should fall all over himself to see them and be unhappy if he cannot see them every day and oftener.” He was quick to mention to Mary Ethel that he was impervious to their Southern charms and refused to debase himself by engaging in any “bare-faced jollying,” presumably his term for flirtatious behavior.
It wasn’t until the army reassigned him to the Post Hospital at Columbia Barracks, where the 7th Cavalry was stationed, in late 1900 that he described his actual medical work in any detail. From reading his letters, one gets the impression that the doctor got his first real taste of military life only after losing his privileged position at Lee’s Palace and being assigned to care for enlisted men.
“I am in a large hospital where they do good surgery although the cases are very few because the command is in exceptional health; I have a ward to myself, I instruct the hospital-corps men in anatomy and minor surgery and also in field drill; and I get an occasional minor operation for myself. . . . The Corps has a fine operating room, an X Ray machine, a large disinfecting plant, and two yellow fever camps, although just at present there are very few cases of this disease out here, they are all in Havana.”
In his letters to Mary Ethel, Lt. Allen mentioned yellow fever several times. For American soldiers stationed in Cuba, the risk of contracting the disease remained a constant threat. Immediately after the war, the US Army committed itself to sanitizing civilian and military facilities in an effort to rid the island of yellow fever. But the method of transmission of the disease was still unknown. So a research board of army doctors was assembled for the purpose of studying and eradicating yellow fever in Cuba. “Major [Walter] Reed and his Tropical disease board are stationed here [Columbia Barracks],” Lt. Allen wrote, “and pursue their very interesting investigations in regard to the mosquito theory of yellow fever.” Eventually, through many trials of experimentation, the board confirmed that the mosquito transmitted the disease. While he does not make mention of it to Mary Ethel, Lt. Allen assisted the medical board in their research on yellow fever, thereby opening himself up to the risk of exposure.
By early 1901, Lt. Allen had grown tired of his duties in Cuba. “I am getting sick of Cuba. There is no work to be done here and although the pay is good and the life pleasant . . . I am making very little progress in my profession.” Eager for a change of scenery and work life, Lt. Allen annulled his contract with the US Army in April 1901. Soon after, Dr. Allen became the first anesthetist at the Free Hospital for Women in Brookline, though it’s easy to imagine him looking back fondly on his time in Cuba.
Image: Dr. Freeman Allen in Cuba, atop his horse (mentioned above), Billy
By: Timothy Spezia, Museum Docent
Letters, Freeman Allen to Mary Ethel Gibson, May 1900–February 1901
Samuel D. Morris, Alina J. Morris, and Mark A. Rockoff, “Freeman Allen: Boston’s Pioneering Physician Anesthetist,” Anesthesia & Analgesia no. 5 (November 2014).
Secretary’s Report No. II, Harvard College Class of 1893, p. 18; accessed via hathitrust.org.
Secretary’s Report No. III, Harvard College Class of 1893, p. 36; accessed via hathitrust.org.
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