506- TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



extracts from the Journal of the United Service Institution, of 

 Great Britain, vol. 11, 1859, 



Ox THE Sanitary Condition of the British Army. By Wm. A. 



Guy, Esq. 



"That the mortality of our soldiers, especially the infantry, 

 and more especially the 'foot-guards,' is very much greater than 

 that of any class of the civil population." 



Annual deaths of the foot-guards, of 10,000 216 



Infantry of the line, of 10,000 187 



London fire brigade, of 10,000 _ 70 



"The great mortality of the British soldier is no new fact. 

 In the spring of 1847, Sir H. lie Lacy told the House that, in the 

 Metropolitan barracks, a room thirty-two feet long and twenty 

 feet broad was all the convenience for the eating and sleeping 

 and general living of twenty men — two or three of them being 

 married." Such a room would not afford more than from 250 to 

 300 cubic feet of air to each person. 



"One of the characteristics of fever is, that it is the disease of 

 over-crowding." 



"Cholera is one of those diseases which finds out over-crowded 

 and unwholesome places. In some of our barracks it destroyed 

 from twice to four times as many soldiers as it did civilians." 



Consumption in the army is a prevalent disease. Twenty years 

 ago it carried off 141, of 10,000, in a year. 



"At the present time diseases of the lungs is the cause of the 

 death of fifty-eight, in 10,000, of the civil population of large 

 towns, and 125, in 10,000, of the foot-guards." 



" Sojdiers in Dover Castle must have been rolling, like sheep in 

 the marshes, in a filthy atmosphere, at the rate of 147 feet of air 

 for each." 



Barrack rooms are frequently found in basements, entered by 

 descending steps from the surface level. The tops of the windows, 

 which open on one side only, but little, if at all, above the ground, 

 and that, in Ioav rooms thus situated, a number of men may be 

 found lodged in beds, so closely ranged, that the sick of one 

 touches another. 



Just such a state of things as "Howard" found in our prisons 

 in 1774, and which the Legislature of that day thought too bad 

 for even the worst inmates. 



It was not the ignorance of the architects or the perversencss 



