MEDALS TO MEDICAL OFFICERS. 
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the proper impetus. All the qualities of intrepidity, courage, and 
coolness, requisite by the acting officers, are equally necessary to 
the surgeons of the army and navy. They have frequently upon 
the open field, or in ships, in danger of fire, sinking, or capture, 
coolly to follow their vocation; to amputate, trephine, tie up vessels, 
apply sutures to gaping wounds, extract balls, arrange fractures, 
and fulfil the other offices of their art, that a great battle may 
render necessary, and which were recently described most ably, in 
the House of Commons, by a veteran soldier, Sir Howard Douglas. 
To perform these duties well, the very self-same qualities as 
those which make the brave soldier or sailor are imperatively 
required; and why, then, are not the same means of evoking and 
sustaining the military spirit distributed to them in common with 
the actual fighting men and their leaders ? If medals and ribbons 
are useful in inciting the ardour and rewarding the courage of our 
troops, they would be equally useful in sustaining and rewarding the 
same qualities in the medical men of the army and navy. Military 
surgeons are nothing if they are not imbued with the true military 
spirit; they are frequently killed or wounded in battle; are called 
to the front ranks to succour the wounded men; and it is their 
coolness and skill, exerted on the instant, to which a Wolfe or a 
Nelson must owe all his chance of recovery. Again, we say, as 
participators to the full in all warlike dangers, they should be 
made the sharers of military honours and rewards. Apart, too, 
from the immediate services of naval and military surgeons, our 
profession has done enough for the efficiency of the sea and land 
services to deserve every consideration from civilized governments. 
Medical science has done much to allay the horrors of war, and 
lessen the sacrifice of human life ; it has done, too, quite as much 
as military tactics to strengthen the national arms. It is to 
medicine that our armies owe it, that dysentery and malignant 
diseases do not stalk after large bodies of troops, as they did of 
old, causing oftentimes as much dismay in the rear as the enemy 
in the front, and devastating armies even more rapidly than the 
sword. It is to medicine that our navy, and not less our commerce 
and civilization, owe their immunity from scurvy — a pestilence 
which formerly rendered lengthened voyages or prolonged naval 
operations almost impossible. How could modern naval warfare be 
carried on if such a state of things as that described by an unpre- 
judiced historian, Sir J. Herschel, prevailed in the present day? 
“The sufferings and destruction produced by this horrid disorder 
on board our ships, when, as a matter of course, it broke out after a 
few months’ voyage, seem now almost incredible. Deaths, to the 
amount of eight or ten a-day, in a moderate ship’s company; 
