244 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1918. 



had always claimed far more victims in every campaign than had the 

 bullets of the enemy. With the growth of the knowledge of infec- 

 tions during the last half century, the control of diseases due to pre- 

 ventable causes has become one of the paramount duties of the mili- 

 tary surgeon, and the success he has attained is shown in the re- 

 markably great decrease of sickness in the Russo-Japanese War, and 

 in the present war in Europe, as compared with campaigns of the 

 past. In our own service three great triumphs stand forth — the 

 eradication of yellow fever in Cuba, the prevention of beriberi among 

 Philippine troops, and the suppression of typhoid fever through our 

 entire Army by antityphoid inoculation. 



Looking back a little more than a century and a half the eye is 

 caught by the name of Sir John Pringle (1707-1787), who is called 

 the founder of modern military medicine as contrasted with surgical 

 practice. Pringle, a Scotsman, served on the continent in the mid- 

 century w T ars and was surgeon general of the English Army from 1742 

 to 1758. His work, " Observations on Diseases of the Army," 1752, 

 promulgates the true principles of military sanitation, especially in 

 regard to the ventilation of hospitals, ships, jails, and barracks. He 

 gave a good description of typhus fever, showed that jail fever and 

 hospital fever were the same, correlated the different forms of dysen- 

 tery, and named influenza. About six years later appeared Van 

 Swieten's monograph on camp diseases, and two works on the hy- 

 giene and diseases of sailors by James Lind and Thomas Trotter. 

 Both of these physicians published monographs on the subject of 

 scurvy, which came into great prominence through its ravages among 

 the sailors of Lord Anson's expedition in 1740. 



No review of the history of military medicine would be complete 

 without the mention of some of those military medical men whose 

 names should always be held in memory because of notable services to 

 the cause of progress and humanity. The civilian is apt to think 

 that the duties of the medical officer are light and routine, and that 

 his professional work consists largely in treating venereal diseases. 

 Far otherwise. His life is a busy one, entering into practically every 

 field of medicine, in many of which he delves so deeply that he un- 

 earths nuggets for the use of future generations. The first name I 

 will mention is that of Ambroise Pare, born in 1510, the great French 

 military surgeon whose fame particularly rests on the substitution of 

 the ligature for the actual cautery and the styptic relied upon before 

 his time for the control of hemorrhage. He was not the first to use 

 the ligature, but to him belongs the credit of having led to its general 

 introduction against great opposition. He combated the prevailing 

 opinion that gunshot wounds were poisoned. He opposed the use of 

 boiling oil, popularized the use of the truss, introduced massage, ar- 

 tificial eyes, and staphyloplasty. He described fracture of the neck 



