: 
ADDRESS. xcix 
The results of the labours of the Sanitary Commissioners in the Crimea, 
although the application of their preventive science was an after-thought, 
and late, must have convinced the most sceptical of military men of its 
importance. It became one of the elements of the ultimately superior con- 
dition of the English part of the Allied army*. 
How large a proportion of loss in the French force was due to the absence 
of neglect of preventive measures, we learn from the recent ‘ Relation Medico- 
chirurgicale dela Campagne d’Orient’ of M. Scrive, the head of the Medical 
Department of the French army during that campaign ; and from the admi- 
rable paper on the same subject by Dr. Gavin Milroy, Member of 
the Sanitary Commission to the British Army in the East. To cite our 
neighbour's case, in which the organization of the land-service has a high 
repute, out of a force which averaged during a period of twenty months 
104,000, upwards of 193,000 men were sent into hospital, i.e. at the rate of 
from 9000 to 10,000 per month. About one-fifth of these admissions were 
from wounds and mechanical injuries; the rest were from disease. The 
deaths in the hospitals at Constantinople amounted to 28,000; elsewhere, 
as in the camp and the field-ambulances, the deaths were 28,400, exclusive 
of 7500 slain in action. Of the 28,400 deaths under treatment, about 
4000, or a seventh part of the whole, arose from gun-shot wounds and 
accidents, the other six-sevenths being the result of disease. The official 
returns give a total loss from all causes during the whole Crimean campaign 
of 70,000: it is believed to have exceeded that figure by 10,000. 65,000 
men, out of 309,268, sent from France and Algeria, were invalided in con- 
sequence of disablement from wounds or the effect of disease. 
Dr. Scrive points out that, if the buildings at Gallipoli had been inspeeted 
* These results cannot be better stated than in the words of Miss Nightingale, in an ap- 
peal for the organization of a preventive administration, founded on the sanitary history of 
the Crimean campaign. 
* Tt is,” she says, “a complete example—history does not afford its equal—of an army, 
after a great disaster arising from neglect, having been brought into the highest state of 
health and efficiency. It is the whole experiment on a colossal scale. In all other examples, 
the last step has been wanting to complete the solution of the problem. We had, in the 
first seven months of the Crimean campaign, a mortality among the troops of 60 per cent. 
per annum, from disease alone,—a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the great plague 
of London, and a higher ratio than the mortality of the cholera to the attacks; that is to 
say, there died out of the army in the Crimea an annual rate greater than ordinarily die in 
time of pestilence out of the sick. We had, during the /ast siz months of the war, a mor- 
tality among our sick not much more than among our healthy Guards at home; and a mor- 
tality among our troops, in the last five months, two-thirds only of what it is among our 
troops at home. The mortality among the troops of the line at home, when corrected, as it 
ought to be, according to the proportion of different ages in the service, has been, on an 
ayerage of ten years, 18-7 per 1000 per annum, and among the Guards, 20:4 per 1000 per 
annum, Comparing this with the Crimean mortality, for the last six months of our occu- 
pation, we find that the deaths to admissions were 24 per 1000 per annum; and during the 
last five months, viz. January to May 1856, the mortality among the troops did not exceed 
: 115 per 1000 per annum. Is not this the most complete experiment in army hygiene?” 
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