When at home the Farmer personally helped to care for sick slaves.  He had a special building erected near the Mansion House for use as a hospital.  Once he went to Winchester in the Shenandoah region especially to look after slaves ill with smallpox “and found everything in the utmost confusion, disorder, and backwardness.  Got Blankets and every other requisite from Winchester, and settied things on the best footing I could.”  As he had had smallpox when at Barbadoes, he had no fear of contagion.

Among the entries in his diary are:  “Visited my Plantations and found two negroes sick ... ordered them to be blooded.”  “Found that lightening had struck my quarters and near 10 Negroes in it, some very bad but by letting blood recovered.”  “Found the new negro Cupid ill of a pleurisy at Dogue Run Quarter and had him brot home in a cart for better care of him....  Cupid extremely ill all this day and night.  When I went to bed I thought him within a few hours of breathing his last.”  However, Cupid recovered.

In his contracts with overseers Washington stipulated proper care of the slaves.  Once he complained to his manager that the generality of the overseers seem to “view the poor creatures in scarcely any other light than they do a draught horse or ox; neglecting them as much when they are unable to work; instead of comforting and nursing them when they lye on a sick bed.”  Again he wrote: 

“When I recommended care of and attention to my negros in sickness, it was that the first stage of, and the whole progress through the disorders with which they might be seized (if more than a slight indisposition) should be closely watched, and timely applications and remedies be administered; especially in the pleurisies, and all inflammatory disorders accompanied with pain, when a few day’s neglect, or want of bleeding might render the ailment incurable.  In such cases sweeten’d teas, broths and (according to the nature of the complaint, and the doctor’s prescription) sometimes a little wine, may be necessary to nourish and restore the patient; and these I am perfectly willing to allow, when it is requisite.”

Yet again he complains that the overseers “seem to consider a Negro much in the same light as they do the brute beasts, on the farms, and often times treat them as inhumanly.”

His slaves by no means led lives of luxury and inglorious ease.  A friendly Polish poet who visited Mount Vernon in 1798 was shocked by the poor quarters and rough food provided for them.  He wrote: 

“We entered some negroes’ huts—­for their habitations cannot be called houses.  They are far more miserable than the poorest of the cottages of our peasants.  The husband and his wife sleep on a miserable bed, the children on the floor.  A very poor chimney, a little kitchen furniture amid this misery—­a tea-kettle and cups....  A small orchard with vegetables was situated close to the hut.  Five or six hens, each with ten or fifteen chickens, walked there.  That is the only pleasure allowed to the negroes:  they are not permitted to keep either ducks or geese or pigs.”