This remark does not apply to the light division, or the more distant parts of the right attack, except after the great explosion within their lines in November, 1856, when, from the destruction of the Mental hospitals, a number of the injured v, admitted into the camp I hiring tin- ordinary course of the siege, assistant-surstationed with the troops in the works paid the Attention to the wounded, 1efore they were sent to the rear; but at tlie time of any assault, a staff-surgeon, in addition to assistants, was advanced into one of the ravines, and performed many necessary operations besides attending to the transmission of the wounded, f For many months before the termination of the siege tlu- wounded with very few exceptions, operated upon in trout, and kept in camp till nearly cured, when they nsferred to the lar-v fixed hospitals on the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, or sent to illegible in the scan of the first
From these they pawed on th. ir i-i.-n.ii ambulanoea, in on. ua they have had aa many as 160 capit'il tu.nty four lioun after one sortie, and in another (the left), they had as many as 400 wounded men carried in the course of one night, that of the Nt-.'ml of M October, and especially after Inkerman, when the wounded were sent from camp at a very early date. Thus, then, it is of much consequence to remember, in order to appreciate aright the surgical annals of the war, that at two epochs of the siege, arrangements totally different were, from necessity, followed in the treatment and distribution of the sick and wounded. It can easily be understood what a difference such arrangements must have made in the mortality, after the receipt of such an injury as a compound fracture.
How different it was to keep a patient so circumstanced in a comfortable hospital in camp, and treat him among his comrades, from having him transferred, immediately after the accident, in a jolting carnage over roads full of mud-pits, and in the close hold of a crowded transport over a sea proverbially stormy, to be disembarked, in a manner the most faulty conceivable, at Scutari, admitted among strangers into a great hospital at a period when the fever occasioned by his wound was at its height, and placed under the care of a surgeon who knew nothing of his previous history, or the particulars of his case.* The deplorable effect occasioned by this early transference I will allude to more particularly afterwards.
The system of nursing which was pursued in our hos* It was a most serious error in the transference arrangements that no account of the patient was transmitted along with him, when he passed from one hospital to another. It prevented the surgeon into whose care he fell from having the same interest in him he otherwise might have had, and it obviously stood in the way of his proper treatment, and destroyed most effectually all means of obtaining accurate statistics, or enabling one to follow cases to a termination. The naval authorities managed this much better, in sending a full account of each patient when he was transferred; but, of course, with them this was more easily effected than it was with soldiers.
NT USING. pitals at the i ^ of the war was highly dcfei and led, I doubt not, to the sacrifice of many lives. The i the sick coi: xelusivcly of sold: very nts, whose strength was not sufored to enable them to resume duty; and not unfrequently of the worst set-up and most useless of tinpriva'.vsence in the ranks could be easily dispensed with. These were detailed for the service of the hospitals in the proportion of one attendant to ten sick, and in the transports, in the proportion of. hint to twenty-five sick. The necessity, during arly part of the war, of having at his post every man who could carry a musket, kept the number of orderlies rather below than above this proportion, and ned the employment of men utterly unfit fr the duty.