i6 4 CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE 



surgery before and after Lister. Capt. Louis C. Duncan 

 of our corps published a very interesting and comprehen- 

 sive article 15 just before the present European war broke 

 out. 



He states that in Motley's "Rise of the Dutch Republic" 

 in three volumes covering "30 years of almost constant 

 sanguinary warfare" in the sixteenth century he "never 

 once alludes to an army surgeon or an army hospital" ! 

 The surgeons were undoubtedly not officially attached to 

 the army, but were in the suites of kings, princes or 

 great nobles, as was Pare, in the same century. 



To Sir James McGrigor in the Peninsular Campaign 

 (1808-11) only fifty years before our Civil War, is given 

 the credit by Duncan of first collecting accurate military 

 medical statistics. 



One hundred and fifty years ago 25 per cent, or more 

 of the wounded died. In the Civil War and in the Franco- 

 Prussian War of 1870-1 the rate had fallen to about 15 

 per cent., while to-day up to the present war not over 5 

 or 6 per cent, die of wounds. 



The Crimean War will always be an example of utter 

 inefficiency in the English and even worse in the French 

 army. Its one bright spot is the splendid epoch-making 

 work of a woman, Florence Nightingale, whose labors 

 were unceasing and effective. Every war since then has 

 seen less sickness and fewer deaths because of what she 

 then accomplished. 



Chenu, the French medical historian of that war, has 

 made one curious and interesting calculation, partly offi- 

 cial, partly estimated. The number of projectiles of all 

 kinds actually fired he gives as 89,595,363. The total 

 number of killed and wounded was 175,057. This would 

 show that it took 512 projectiles to kill or wound one 

 man. Such a disproportion would more than justify a 

 cartoon during our Civil War. Two soldiers were sur- 



15 Journal of the Military Service Institutions of the United 

 States, March-April, 1914. 



