THE APPLICATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO THE 

 GREAT WAR IN THE ZONE OF THE ARMY.^ 



By bailey K. ASHFORD. 

 {Read April 24, 19 19.) 



It may be somewhat of a disappointment that I should present 

 so little that is new to this Society, but war has requisitioned of 

 science its application and not its theories and each man has been 

 called upon to produce a result. The interest in this subject lies in 

 seeing how far sanitary science could be applied on the battlefield 

 and what part it took in winning this war. Let us answer the last 

 question first : 



In the Civil War there were 65 deaths from disease annually per 

 1,000 of strength; in the Spanish-American War there were 30; in 

 the Greatest of Wars just concluded there were 14.8 and of these 

 about 12 were due to epidemic pneumonia. That is to say, the med- 

 ical sciences have kept 100,000 American men in fighting trim w^ho 

 would have in 1861 died of disease, and America needed those men. 

 There was no time to get trained men from home, nor vessels in 

 which to send them ; the expense per man, the least consideration, 

 was enormous, and, above all, if the liberty of the world was to be 

 won at all it had to be done by the brawn of these very men and like 

 men of our Allies. It had to be done then. The hour had struck. 

 All the treasure and patriotic devotion of our country was helpless 

 to do more in this crisis. When one reflects that never have armies 

 been forced to live under more menacing conditions to health than 

 those under which our soldiers lived and fought — at times, for mili- 

 tary reasons, with reduced rations and much of the time under- 

 ground, one cannot but wonder how it is that our generous people 

 do not yeld more than a passing thought to the scientist and to the 

 science that made his invisible weapons. And the prevention of dis- 



1 Authority to publish has been granted by the Board of Publications, 

 Office of the Surgeon General. 



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