“I Am not afraid to die, and therefore I can hear the worst,” Washington reportedly told his doctor, Samuel Bard, some seven weeks after his inauguration.16 According to Bard, he suffered from the cutaneous form of anthrax, which caused a carbuncle (an infection of the soft tissue) in his upper thigh. Washington did his best to avoid eighteenth-century medicine, which often left patients worse off than they began, but was in too much pain to object to Dr. Bard’s insistence:
