this. After tasting some, I ceased to
wonder at the atrocities of Wirz and his associates. Nothing would seem
too bad to a man who made that his habitual tipple.

[For a more particular description of the Hospital I must refer my reader
to the testimony of Professor Jones, in a previous chapter.]

Certainly this continent has never seen--and I fervently trust it will
never again see--such a gigantic concentration of misery as that Hospital
displayed daily. The official statistics tell the story of this with
terrible brevity: There were three thousand seven hundred and nine in the
Hospital in August; one thousand four hundred and eighty-nine--nearly
every other man died. The rate afterwards became much higher than this.

The most conspicuous suffering was in the gangrene wards. Horrible sores
spreading almost visibly from hour to hour, devoured men's limbs and
bodies. I remember one ward in which the alterations appeared to be
altogether in the back, where they ate out the tissue between the skin
and the ribs. The attendants seemed trying to arrest the progress of the
sloughing by drenching the sores with a solution of blue vitriol. This
was exquisitely painful, and in the morning, when the drenching was going
on, the whole hospital rang with the most agonizing screams.

But the gangrene mostly attacked the legs and arms, and the led more than
the arms. Sometimes it killed men inside of a week; sometimes they
lingered on indefinitely. I remember one man in the Stockade who cut his
hand with the sharp corner of a card of corn bread he was lifting from
the ration wagon; gangrene set in immediately, and he died four days
after.

One form that was quit prevalent was a cancer of the lower one corner of
the mouth, and it finally ate the whole side of the face out. Of course
the sufferer had the greatest trouble in eating and drinking. For the
latter it was customary to whittle out a little wooden tube, and fasten
it in a tin cup, through which he could suck up the water. As this mouth
cancer seemed contagious, none of us would allow any one afflicted with
it to use any of our cooking utensils. The Rebel doctors at the hospital
resorted to wholesale amputations to check the progress of the gangrene.

They had a two hours session of limb-lopping every morning, each of which
resulted in quite a pile of severed members. I presume more bungling
operations are rarely seen outside of Russian or Turkish hospitals.