Course of lectures on army sanitation / by C.H. Melville.

  • Melville, C. H. (Charles Henderson)
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Course of lectures on army sanitation / by C.H. Melville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/94 (page 172)
    actually managed to make a lodgment in the tissues, but has been over- come by the natural resisting powers of the body. Accepting the above statement that no one class of cause cau by itself produce disease, it is obvious that our plan of defence must be so drawn as to repel attack in two directions. We must strive so to maintain the resisting powers of the individual that he shall be able to overcome the attack of the organism if that make a lodgment, and we must also at the same time attack the latter and destroy it, or at least prevent its entry into the bodv. Now I want to insist that, dealing with military sanitation, the former method of defence is far more important than the latter. In the first place we start fair: our population is a selected population. In the second it is, if not impossible, at least enormously difficult under the conditions of life in camp, to prevent occasional infection of the individual bv the germs of the diseases which chiefly affect the soldier in the field. What these are I shall come to later. We can minimize the strength of the attack, and we can diminish its frequency, but it would be utopian to suppose that we can ever absolutely prevent it. To use a military metaphor occasionally our first line of defence will be pierced, and we must rely for victory on the strength of our reserve. I will begin, therefore, by considering the causes which chiefly lower the soldier’s resisting power, and how these may be obviated, which I shall call the preservation of health, and later go on to consider the actual prevention of disease, that is the attack on the actual disease germs, the ultimate exciting causes of disease. For this purpose my next lecture will deal with the important subject of marching, and all that word entails, since here we shall find the causes which more than any others lower the soldier’s resisting power. My later lectures will he directed to a study of water .supply, and removal and dispos d of excreta, dealing that is with the channels by which disease germs pass from the bodv of the infected to that of the healthy man, under those conditions of life which we term field service. But before entering into these matters it is necessary that I should devote a short time to a consideration of the position of military sanitation in the great system of strategy. Sanitation, especially military sanitation, is an adaptation of man to his surroundings, and sanitation must obviously therefore begin by adapting itself to the surroundings in which it has to work, by accommodating its activity to the working of the other arts which all go together to form the great art of war. I speak here only of war, since the Territorial Army does not exist as an organic whole except in time of war. Now in ordinary life, and indeed in the life of the army during peace, sanitation is an end in itself. Its great object is to keep the community healthy, and this is recognised to a great extent in the fact that offences against sanitary law are punished as what is termed nuisances, things harmful or