A report on a plan for transporting wounded soldiers by railway in time of war : with descriptions of various methods employed for this purpose on different occasions / by George A. Otis.

George Alexander Otis

Date:: 1875

Credit: A report on a plan for transporting wounded soldiers by railway in time of war : with descriptions of various methods employed for this purpose on different occasions / by George A. Otis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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$Dr. Morache, adjunct-professor of the French School of Military Medicine, and author of an essay on the various methods of railway transport of sick and wounded, has proposed a plan for the outfit of cars for sanitary purposes, selecting the method commended by Dr. Loeffler as the best provision for litters resting on the floors of cars; but adding a superimposed tier of litters suspended from a tubular iron rod near the roof, * by iron rectangular frames connected Fig. 5^.—Project for the conversion of the Lyons freight-car to hospital use [After Morache.] with the rod by gutta percha. After referring to the assertion of French engineers that long cars are impracticable on their roads, abounding in short curves, and declaring that it is preferable on the score of economy to use freight rather than passenger cars, M. Morache submits a project for placing litters for ten patients in the box-cars and on the six principal French lines. These cars vary in interior dimensions from 18 to 21 feet in length by 7 feet in breadth, f The litters are only 1 m. 75 in leng-th by 0.75 in width. Six are placed, in two ranges, on one side of the car, four only on the other side leaving a space reserved for a stove, chair, table, and set of shelves (Fig. 50). The litters are complex, consisting of a light lower frame, resting on the *MOKACHE. Les Trains Sanitaires; Etude sur I'emploi des chemins de fer pour I'evacuation des blesses et malades en arriere des armees, Paris, 1872. This work gives a comprehensive review of the whole subject, and I regret that I did not meet with it until this report was nearly completed. It contains many interesting details, especially in regard to the work per- formed by the German hospital trains during the Franco-German war. The project for the conversion of French passenger and freight cars to hospital use has, however, obviously never been subjected to practical trial, else M. Morache would never have recommended the sus- pension of litters by gutta-percha rings. He has been misled by Professor Hamilton {pp. cit., p. 168), into the statement that this brittle substance was used for suspension rings in the American hospital cars. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that gutta-percha is the inspissated juice of the Isonarda Percha or /. Gutta (Hooker) and that the vulcanized rubber rings used in the United States and in Germany were of caoutchouc, a product of several species of the genera Siphonia, Hevea, Jatropha and Ficus, and though somewhat resembling gutta-percha in chemical constitution, widely differing in its physical properties. tM. Morache gives the exact measurements: The freight cars of the railway duMidi: 6 m. 45 in length, 2 m. 5 in breadth and 2 m. 45 in height. Those of the railway de Lyon are 5 m. 5 in length, by 2 m. 5 in breadth and 2 m. 4 in height.$