and then to one who has
ophthalmia,--passing on to a fellow raving in delirium tremens,--next to
whom is a sufferer under bronchitis, who will not be allowed to go out
of doors for weeks to come; and if half a dozen are brought in with
cholera in the course of the day, the officials do not know which way to
turn. It is possible that the surgeon may be found making starch over
the kitchen fire, because there is nobody at hand who understands how to
make starched bandages; or he may be at the desk, casting up columns of
figures, or writing returns, when he is urgently wanted at the bedside.
Such things can hardly happen now; but they have happened within ten
years. The Russians, meantime, would be carrying all manner of patients
to one of their hospital-stations,--each sufferer to the hospital of his
own division. The French would leave the men with scratches and slight
diarrhea and delirium tremens in the Regimental Hospital,--would send
the fever and bronchitis and scorbutic patients to the Divisional,--and
any gravely wounded, or rheumatic, or other very long cases to the
General Hospital at the base of operations.

Such arrangements, however, are of no use, if the last be not so
organized as to render it fit to supply what the others cannot give, and
to answer purposes which the others cannot even propose.

When doctors and soldiers alike shuddered at the mention of the General
Hospital as a necessary institution at or near the seat of war, they
were thinking of what they had seen or heard of during the Peninsular
Campaigns. There were such infirmaries wherever there was a line of
march in Spain; and they seemed to be all alike. Hospital gangrene set
in among the wounded, and fever among the sick, so that the soldiers
said, "To send a poor fellow to the hospital is to send him to death."
Yet there was nothing else to be done; for it was impossible to treat
the seriously sick and wounded at the spot where they fell. During that
war, nearly twice the number which composed the army passed through the
hospitals every year; and of these there were known deaths to the amount
of thirteen thousand five hundred; and thousands more were never the
same men again. When the case was better understood,--as during the last
year in the Crimea,--the mortality in the hospitals barely exceeded that
of the Guards in their barracks at home! Recovery had become the rule,
and death a remarkable event. General Hospitals had come to surpass a