The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

According to the company’s records 125 employees died in 1882, more than twice the number given for the first year. In 1883 there were 420 recorded deaths, or almost eight times the number given the first year. Yet such figures can be taken as only suggestive. Patients in the company hospitals were charged $1 a day, nearly a day’s wages. While the company covered this expense for its own employees, all but a fraction of the labor force worked for the contractors, not the company. Aware of what hospital expenses could amount to, familiar with the mortality rate inside the wards, the contractors were reluctant to finance such care and would even discharge a man at the first sign of illness to avoid the responsibility. Among the workers themselves the hospitals were regarded with abject horror, the common belief being that if a patient did not have malaria or yellow fever when he entered, he would very shortly. A hospital permit was considered little better than a ticket to the graveyard.1 So for all these reasons the majority of the sick never went near a hospital, and consequently, the majority of deaths never appeared in the record books. Dr. Gorgas would calculate that for every recorded death in the French hospitals there were at least two more outside that were not counted. In other words, the given casualty figures have to be multiplied by three: the toll in 1883 was closer to 1,300 than to 420.