The statistics of disease in armies, the ascertainment of the numbers who sicken and who die of particular diseases, would save more lives in future generations than can be now appreciated; but what can the regimental surgeon do towards furnishing any trustworthy materials to such an inquiry?  A dozen doctors, with each his smattering of patients, can learn and teach but little while they work apart:  whereas a regular system of inquiry and record, in action where the sick are brought in in battalions, is the best possible agency.  Not only are these objects lost when surgeons are allowed to make the 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 among the confusion of regimental records, without getting what we wanted.  As to the method of proceeding, I may have something to say farther on.  Meantime, we must turn to the primary object of the institution of the Military Hospital,—­the cure of the wounded and sick of the army.