A report on the sanitary condition of the Army : particularly during the late war with Russia / by a non-commissioner.

  • Non-Commissioner.
Date:
[1858]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A report on the sanitary condition of the Army : particularly during the late war with Russia / by a non-commissioner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    There are other means of estimating the sanitary condition of hospitals, but the singular reserve which still withholds the official returns of our hospitals during the war from the public, precludes the possi- bility of using the materials they contain either for the establishment of the truth, or the exposure of error. In the table (p. 625, Appendix) given by the Royal Commission, we find some information pos- sessing a certain interest as regards the hospitals of the whole Army. For example, although 18,283 wounded, and about 4,000 other injuries and accidents passed through these hospitals, yet the admissions with erysipelas and mortification (no bad tests of their sanitary condition) were only 157, and the deaths from both diseases 41, while the mortality among the wounded did not exceed 9’6 per cent. In Ijlovember 1854, when the hospitals at Scutari were supposed to be at the worst, the General and Barrack Hospitals contained 2,074 wounded, nearly all by gun-shot, and experienced practical surgeons will be gratified to learn that only 108 deaths took place among the whole number, including four from sloughing, being in the ratio of 5'2 per cent, during the month. Again, on 218 operations, chiefly am- putations, several of which were secondary, the deaths were 30, or 13*8 per cent, for the same period. (Maxwell and Cumming’s Report, p. 259.) The admissions with typhus and continued fever were 25,841, and the deaths 3,075, or 1]*9 per cent., whereas in Guy’s Hospital “the average ratio of mortality from that species of disease is 10-3 per cent.” (Med. Chir. Trans. 1857, p. 187.) We shall only add that (exclusive of killed in action) one- fourth of the total mortality in the Army was caused by cholera, which cut off two in every three attacked, but the rate of mortality was even higher at Scutari in November 1855, “nearly three-fourths” of the patients having died. These hospitals had been under sani- tary management for eight months before the cholera