Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the sanitary state of the army in India : with précis of evidence / presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty.

  • Great Britain. Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary State of the Army in India.
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the sanitary state of the army in India : with précis of evidence / presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    General, and Colonel Durand, since called to India, were added to the Commission, and Lord Stanley consented to succeed Lord Herbert as Chairman. We have thought it necessary to make this statement to account for the lengthy period which has intervened between the date of Your Majesty’s Commission and the date of this Report. An inquiry extending over so large an area, and in- cluding so great a multiplicity of details, many of them of a minute character, has been necessarilv voluminous and expensive ; but the evidence which it has called forth appears to us to be so important, not only to the interests of troops serving in India, but to those inextricably inter- woven with them of the native population, that we have not scrupled to publish it for official use, partly for the purpose of spreading information, and partly in order that the correctness of the statements made by us might be fully sustained by authority. Appended to the Report, we have given a precis of the evidence ; and, separately, the oral evidence,* with some important addenda made to it by the witnesses, P. 371. an abstract of all the stational reports,j* and a valuable P. 347. paper of comments on these reports, contributed, at the request of the Commission, by Miss Nightingale. P. 527. The medical statistics for the troops of the late East India Company, and also for those of the Royal army (the latter prepared at the Army Medical Department), which follow, have been drawn up from the best available data, supplied partly from India, partly by His Royal Highness the Commander-in-Chief, and by the Secretary P. 781. of State for India. These, together with a paper on the geographical distribution of Indian climates prepared at our request by Mr. Glaisher, contain the main statistical facts of the inquiry. Involving a wide range of subjects, our researches have been minute, and the evidence b}^ which our conclusions are borne out is necessarily volumi- nous. But we believe that the abstracts referred to contain the substance of all the facts in such a form as to render reference to the evidence almost needless, * The evidence, &c. is set out at length in a separate folio volume, printed for official use, and the figures here placed in the margin refer to the page or number of question in such folio, except the references to pages of this report placed within brackets, and marked ante or post. [See note p. 201 post.~\ f These reports from Indian stations given in full form a second folio, or “ Appendix to Evidence.”