The sanitary reform of the British Army / by Philostratiōtēs.

  • Philostratiōtēs.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The sanitary reform of the British Army / by Philostratiōtēs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/24 (page 10)
    and sickly employments, even that of miners, who are hourly exposed to accidents of various kinds, and to the most deadly influences.* The greatest perils are not those of the battle-field. History, poetry, and fiction describe, in powerful and affecting language, the carnage of the field, the siege, the deadly breach, and the march, and call up before the mind’s eye scenes of horror, relieved only by the halo of glory thrown around them ; but the Eeport of the Koyal Commission, in pitiless arithmetic, at once demolishes the popular delusion, and exposes, in all the naked¬ ness of unadorned truth, the horrible fact that the mortality of the British Army is so inconsiderably swelled by losses in action, that, compared with the silent and gradual waste of life at home and in peace, “ it is not worth mentioning; ” that the Minie ball, the shell, the rocket, the bayonet, and the sabre, are less deadly than pestilence and disease, originated and perpetuated by in¬ attention to the commonest rules of medical hygiene. If ever sanitary science had a favourable field to operate upon, it exists in our army. In recruiting all are rejected (nearly one- third of those offered) who are weak, sickly, or exhibit seeds of latent disease; those accepted are further reduced in number by invaliding; those who show symptoms of breaking-up, and those left, are still further reduced by the discharge of men who have served the period for which they enlisted, and whose deaths (76 per 1,000) swell the returns of the Eegistrar-General, and not those of the Horse Guards. Yet, with all these advantages, twice as many men die year by year in the ranks of the army, as in the classes of the civil popu¬ lation, from which they were taken, and on whom the rejected lives, to the number of 57,381 in ten years, from 1842 to 1852, have been thrown back. Colonel Sir A. M. Tulloch, K.C.B., in his replies (6367—6369) states the civil population loses, from 20 to 25 years of age, at 9.6 per 1000, while, in the Cavalry, the mortality shown is upwards of 11 per 1,000, in the Line, 18 per 1,000, and in the Guards, upwards of 20 per 1,000, and this has been increasiug of late years, till the Grenadier Guards now stand at 21.5 per 1,000! A general officer informed the author, that when he took the Guards to the Crimea they could stand no fatigue—they were, to use his own words, “ perfectly rotten.” On inquiry as to the cause, his reply was, “ Drunkenness, and dissi^Kition in London.'' This only confirms the opinion given by Louis Cornaro more than three hundred years ago, “ There cannot be health or long life without perfect sobriety.’’f This fearful state of things has been ascribed to various causes, “Why,” asks the Hon. Sidney Herbert, “should the profession of arms entail on those who adopt it a higher rate of mortality than almost any other profession ? ”—The answer to this important question will be found in the following pages. t Discorsi della Vita Sobria.*' Padua. 1658.