c REPORT—1858. 
and made fit for the purpose before they were occupied as an hospital, a 
regiment of active young soldiers might have been saved. 
At Varna, a Turkish barrack within the walls was prematurely occupied as 
an hospital: it had to be abandoned after great loss of life. Fewer men fell 
in the unsuccessful attack upon the Malakoff on the 18th of June than suc- 
cumbed in the rash attempt to use, as an hospital, a place which had not been 
previously fitted for one. And the time and labour required by the Sanitary 
Inspector to effect their fitness are as nothing compared with the prelimi- 
nary approaches to the Malakoff, and with the delay and impediments caused 
by the prostration of a large proportion of effective force by disease. 
Without consulting the medical staff, it was determined to move from 
Varna to the notoriously malarial region on the south of the Danube, 
called the Dobrudscha. On the 20th of July the first division of the army 
moved from Varna; on the 26th the cholera broke out. Hundreds of men 
were struck down at once, and died within a few hours after being seized: 
in one regiment 300 men were attacked within twenty-four hours, and 
most of them died on the spot. Appalled by the blow, the commanding 
officer retreated, as from before an overwhelming force ; but, ere he could 
reach the healthier locality, one-third of the division had perished, and num- 
bers reached the coast only to expire on the beach. 
No enemy had been encountered save that one, of whose power and pre= 
sence sanitary science had in vain forewarned the commander. On the 
return of the first division to Varna, a force of 12,000 had been reduced 
to 7000; the victims including two general officers and seven medical 
officers. 
Not to weary by other special instances of the effect of neglecting pre- 
ventive preparatory sanitary measures, I may sum up by the statement that 
one pestilence, in the marshes of the Danube, within two months, out of an 
army 55,000 strong, and before a shot had been fired, had destroyed as many 
men as were slain by the enemy in the field during the twelve months from 
the landing in the Crimea to the capture of Sebastopol, and when the 
army averaged double the above number of men. 
That this pestilence, or its fatal effects, might have been, in an important 
degree, prevented by practicable applications of sanitary science is the conyic- 
tion of the ablest medical officers of the French and English armies ; and 
this conviction was substantiated by the results of the Sanitary Com- 
mission which operated in the English lines before Sebastopol. These au- 
thorities concur in the conclusion that three-fourths of the losses of an army 
in the field are not from the enemy or from unavoidable casualties of service, 
“but from diseases which are more or less under control.” “ Of these,” 
writes Dr. Milroy, “typhus and scurvy are two of the most formidable, and 
the most easily preventible. They are the inevitable products of certain 
well-ascertained conditions, and they may be generated at will as surely as 
any salt or other compound may be formed by the chemist in his laboratory. 
