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 all other means of curing patients, while fulfilling their own peculiar service to society through new generations.

What are the functions of General Hospitals, besides curing the sick and wounded? some readers may ask, who have never particularly attended to the subject.

The first business of such institutions is undoubtedly to restore as many as possible of the sufferers brought into them:  and this includes the duty of bringing in the patients in the most favorable way, receiving them in an orderly and quiet manner, doctoring, nursing, feeding, clothing, and cleaning them, keeping their minds composed and cheerful, and their manners creditable, promoting their convalescence, and dismissing them in a state of comfort as to equipment.  This is the first duty, in its many subdivisions.  The next is to obviate, as far as possible, future disease in any army.  The third grows out of this.  It is to improve the science of the existing generation by a full use of the peculiar opportunities of observation afforded by the crop of sickness and wounds yielded by an army in action.  To take these in their reverse order.

There must be much to learn from any great assemblage of sickness, under circumstances which can be fully ascertained, even at home,—­and much more in a foreign climate.  The medical body of every nation has very imperfect knowledge of classes and modifications of diseases; so that one of the strongest desires of the most learned physicians is for an improved classification and constantly improving nomenclature of diseases; and hospital-records afford the most direct way to this knowledge.  Thus, while the phenomena are frittered away among Regimental or unorganized General Hospitals, a well-kept record in each well-organized hospital will do more than all other means to promote the scientific understanding of disease.