Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The United States Sanitary Commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![made by government, was a leading point in the problem which the Sanitary Commission and its General Secretary must prac- tically solve during the first months of the service. That this early policy of the Commission has been faithfully maintained, and that the great problems which engrossed its attention the first year of the war have been satisfactorily solved, the daily operations both of the preventive and the relief departments of the work abundantly testify. It is due alike to the Sanitary Commission and to the people who support its operations to say, that this purpose to make the country's voluntary offerings of science and succor merely supplementary, had in#it nothing of feebleness and sycophancy. Its ruling motive has always been that of manly and zealous defence and care of the soldier. That motive was thus stated in the Commission's report to the Secretary of War, in Decem- ber, 1861: — The one point which controls the Commission is just this: a simple desire and resolute determination to secure for the men who have en- listed in this war that care which it is the will and the duty of the nation to give them. That care is their right, and, in the government or out of it, it must be given them, let who will stand in the way. The experience of other wars and other nations could not with any certainty guide the Sanitary Commission in its esti- mates of the amount of supplementary aid that would be re- quired, nor was there any example or light to guide to the successful preparation and adoption of the needed methods of succor and assistance. The murderous waste of life and loss of armies in the Crimea, as well as the example there present- ed of the positive power and certainty of sanitary measures, as the means of salvation from such calamities, served as beacon- lights, and as such they were constantly in view. The Com- mission was strongly impressed with the facts that the destroy- ing angel who follows in the trail of armies exacts from every man to the full whatever penalties follow on the infraction of natural law ; that the waste of human life and the destruc- tion of human health and happiness [in time of war] have been in all ages many times greater from disease than from actual encounter in the field, and that the faithful records of all wars](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21158964_0013.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
