On the sickness and mortality in the French Army, during the campaign in Turkey and the Crimea, in 1854-56 / by Gavin Milroy.

  • Gavin Milroy
Date:
[1857]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the sickness and mortality in the French Army, during the campaign in Turkey and the Crimea, in 1854-56 / by Gavin Milroy. 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.

    13/22 page 13
    apart from each other, kept thoroughly ventilated, and not crowded. Great praise, it seems to me, is due to M. Scrive for the judgment he showed in the whole business. He had been consulted by General Canrobert as to the propriety of moving up the Imperial Guard from Constantinople, while they were still under the influence of cholera. On a due consideration of all the circumstances, M. Scrive thought that they might be so advantageously, provided proper precautions were taken. The result proved the wisdom of his advice, and may be fairly quoted as one out of many instances of the value of enlightened medical opinion in the operations of a campaign. The irregularly erratic—one might almost say, the capri- cious—course and movements of the cholera in the camp might find an analogy in those of a blight in the vegetable world, or in the wanderings to and fro of insect swarms over a district, but were quite inexplicable on any hypothesis of contagious transmission, or of a generally and uniformly- diffused atmospheric contamination. The disease did not appear simultaneously in the two great divisions of the French army forming the left and the right attacks^ but rather in succession in the one after the other. The second corps d^armeey operating against the Mamelon and Malakoff, suffered first; and it was not till a week or two later that the other corps d^armee at the extreme left began to be affected. One division of this latter corps, which formed part of the expedition to Kertch at this period, and which apppeared to be free from the disease when it sailed from Kamiesch on the 22nd of May, was attacked a few days after landing at Kertch, and therefore about the very same time as their comrades before Sebastopol. About the end of this month, the sick list was swelled by a good many cases of intermittent fever, occurring chiefly among the troops which had taken possession of the marshy flat of the Tchernaya (recently evacuated by the Russians), or among the soldiers who had had the disease at Rome or in Algeria. Remittent fever, also, became more rife with the increased heats of summer; nor was typhus quite extinct in the hospitals, for more than one medical officer fell a victim to it in May. June proved to be a very sickly, as well as a very san- guinary, month. Out of a force estimated at 122,000 men, little short of a sixth part was sent into hospital by disease and by gunshot wounds. The admissions from the casualties of war, compared with those from zymotic disease, were in
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3