to their afflicted condition.  In many cases, even of the greatest apparent suffering and distress, instead of showing any anxiety to communicate the causes of their distress, or to relate their privations, and their longings for their homes and their friends and relatives, they lay in a listless, lethargic, uncomplaining state, taking no notice either of their own distressed condition, or of the gigantic mass of human misery by which they were surrounded.  Nothing appalled and depressed me so much as this silent, uncomplaining misery.  It is a fact of great interest, that notwithstanding this defective nutrition in men subjected to crowding and filth, contagious fevers were rare; and typhus fever, which is supposed to be generated in just such a state of things as existed at Andersonville, was unknown.  These facts, established by my investigations, stand in striking contrast with such a statement as the following by a recent English writer: 

“A deficiency of food, especially of the nitrogenous part, quickly leads to the breaking up of the animal frame.  Plague, pestilence and famine are associated with each other in the public mind, and the records of every country show how closely they are related.  The medical history of Ireland is remarkable for the illustrations of how much mischief may be occasioned by a general deficiency of food.  Always the habitat of fever, it every now and then becomes the very hot-bed of its propagation and development.  Let there be but a small failure in the usual imperfect supply of food, and the lurking seeds of pestilence are ready to burst into frightful activity.  The famine of the present century is but too forcible and illustrative of this.  It fostered epidemics which have not been witnessed in this generation, and gave rise to scenes of devastation and misery which are not surpassed by the most appalling epidemics of the Middle Ages.  The principal form of the scourge was known as the contagious famine fever (typhus), and it spread, not merely from end to end of the country in which it had originated, but, breaking through all boundaries, it crossed the broad ocean, and made itself painfully manifest in localities where it was previously unknown.  Thousands fell under the virulence of its action, for wherever it came it struck down a seventh of the people, and of those whom it attacked, one out of nine perished.  Even those who escaped the fatal influence of it, were left the miserable victims of scurvy and low fever.”

While we readily admit that famine induces that state of the system which is the most susceptible to the action of fever poisons, and thus induces the state of the entire population which is most favorable for the rapid and destructive spread of all contagious fevers, at the same time we are forced by the facts established by the present war, as well as by a host of others, both old and new, to admit that we are still ignorant of the causes necessary for the origin of