great hospital a mere receptacle
for a cluster of small and desultory hospitals, but the advantages of a
broad study of diseases and their treatment are lost. Inestimable facts
of treatment are learned by watching, at the same time and in the same
place, a ward full of patients ill of the same disease. People of all
countries know this by the special learning which their physicians
obtain in large civil hospitals: and the same thing happens in military
hospitals, with the additional advantage that the information and
improved art tend to the special safety of the future soldiery, in
whatever climate they may be called on to serve.

There has long been some general notion of the duty of army-surgeons
to record what they saw in foreign campaigns; but no benefit has been
reaped till of late. The works of French field-surgeons have long been
justly celebrated; but I do not know that in the statistics and the
nomenclature of disease they have done much more than others. The
English surgeons carried or sent home in 1810 a mass of papers about the
Walcheren fever, and afterwards of the diseases of the Peninsular force:
but the Director General of the Medical Department considered such a
bulk of records troublesome, and ordered them to be burnt! Such an
act will never be perpetrated again; but directors will have a more
manageable mass of documents to deal with henceforth. With a regular
system of record, at a central station of observation, much more may be
done with much less fatigue to all parties.

But how is it to be done? may well be asked. In the hurry and confusion
of a war, and amidst the pressure of hundreds of new cases in a day,
what can the surgeons of the hospital be expected to do for science, or
even for the improvement of medical and surgical practice?--The answer
is seen in the new arrangements in England, where a statistical branch
has been established in the Army Medical Department. Of course, no one
but the practising surgeon or physician can furnish the pathological
facts in each individual case; but this is what every active and earnest
practitioner does always and everywhere, when he sees reason for it.
His note-book or hospital-journal provides that raw material which the
statistical department is to arrange and utilize. The result will be
that a flood of light will be cast on matters affecting the health and
life of soldiers and other men, in regard to which we might have gone on
groping for centuries