Despite his strength and constitution, Washington was frequently the victim of illness.  What diseases of childhood he suffered are not known, but presumably measles was among them, for when his wife within the first year of married life had an attack he cared for her without catching the complaint.  The first of his known illnesses was “Ague and Feaver, which I had to an extremity” about 1748, or when he was sixteen.

In the sea voyage to Barbadoes in 1751, the seamen told Washington that “they had never seen such weather before,” and he says in his diary that the sea “made the Ship rowl much and me very sick.”  While in the island, he went to dine with a friend “with great reluctance, as the small-pox was in his family.”  A fortnight later Washington “was strongly attacked with the small Pox,” which confined him for nearly a month, and, as already noted, marked his face for life.  Shortly after the return voyage he was “taken with a violent pleurise, which ... reduced me very low.”

During the Braddock march, “immediately upon our leaving the camp at George’s Creek, on the 14th, ...  I was seized with violent fevers and pains in my head, which continued without intermission ’till the 23d following, when I was relieved, by the General’s [Braddock] absolutely ordering the physicians to give me Dr. James’ powders (one of the most excellent medicines in the world), for it gave me immediate ease, and removed my fevers and other complaints in four days’ time.  My illness was too violent to suffer me to ride; therefore I was indebted to a covered wagon for some part of my transportation; but even in this I could not continue far, for the jolting was so great, I was left upon the road with a guard, and necessaries, to wait the arrival of Colonel Dunbar’s detachment which was two days’ march behind us, the General giving me his word of honor, that I should be brought up, before he reached the French fort.  This promise, and the doctor’s threats, that, if I persevered in my attempts to get on, in the condition I was, my life would be endangered, determined me to halt for the above detachment.”  Immediately upon his return from that campaign, he told a brother, “I am not able, were I ever so willing, to meet you in town, for I assure you it is with some difficulty, and with much fatigue, that I visit my plantations in the Neck; so much has a sickness of five weeks’ continuance reduced me.”

On the frontier, towards the end of 1757, he was seized with a violent attack of dysentery and fever, which compelled him to leave the army and retire to Mount Vernon.  Three months later he said, “I have never been able to return to my command, ... my disorder at times returning obstinately upon me, in spite of the efforts of all the sons of Aesculapius, whom I have hitherto consulted.  At certain periods I have been reduced to great extremity, and have too much reason to apprehend an approaching decay, being visited with several symptoms of such a disease....