The Sanitary Commission of the United States Army : a succinct narrative of its works and purposes / Sanitary Commission.
- United States Sanitary Commission
- Date:
- 1864
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The Sanitary Commission of the United States Army : a succinct narrative of its works and purposes / Sanitary Commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
258/334 page 248
![Also in my recent trip to Yicksburg, in the service of the Christian Commission, I was at all points kindly received and materially aided by the Sanitary Commission. ' My own feel- ings—that the work of both Commissions, though wrought in dilferen^ departments, should be entirely co-operative—were fully reciprocated by your agents at Cairo, Memphis, and on the Barge on Yazoo River. My observations of your work on that Barge were very pleasant. I saw stores dispensed to needy applicants most freely, and in surprising quantity and variety ; and when I got back to the Bluffs, where the sick and wounded were coming into the division hospitals, I found bedding with your mark, dried and canned fruit, and lemons and chickens, which could have been furnished from no other source. I knew that, Avith- out the timely help of the Sanitary Commission, there would have been destitution, and consequent suffering, in many of lho3e hospitals. I want to bear testimony to the noble Christian philanthropy of the men in charge of your Commission in that department. I am persuaded they could not do that work from unworthy motives. Money could not procure such services as you are receiving, for instance, from Dr. Warriner at Vicksburg. Every week's experience in my army work, bringing me among the camps and through the hospitals, and giving an opportunity, which I always improve, to look in at the difierent quarters of your Commission, leads me to a continually higher estimate of the work you have on hand. I am satisfied that your system of distributing hospital supplies is the correct one. Such large contributions as the people are making cannot be handed over to the army on any volunteer system, unless it be for a few days amid the emergencies of a severe battle. A business involving such expenditure would be intrusted by a business man only to permanent and responsible agents. That among all your employes there should be no unworthy man, is more than a reasonable mind can ask. The Christian Commission and the Clu-istian Church would go down under that test. Let me close this letter of thanks, my dear brother, with my daily prayer—a prayer which I learned in your Soldiers' Home in Louisville, and have often repeated since in the Soldiers' Rest at Memphis, on the Barge in Yazoo River, in the Division Hospitals under the guns of Vicksburg, in the Nashville Home and Storeroom, and in the camps and hospitals at Murfrees- borough; a ])rayer fresh on my lips, as I have just come from seeing wounded and typhoid patients at Tullahoma and Win- chester lifted from rough blankets and undressed from the soiled](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21459460_0258.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
