Mortality of the British army : at home and abroad, and during the Russian war, as compared with the mortality of the civil population in England ; illustrated by tables and diagrams.

Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mortality of the British army : at home and abroad, and during the Russian war, as compared with the mortality of the civil population in England ; illustrated by tables and diagrams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.

    14/58 (page 4)
    have the elements of consumption and tubercular disease. If you want to develop the seeds into activity, all you have to do is to take the men out of such au atmosphere which they have been breathing night after night, and expose them on guard to wet and cold, and the disease will soon develop itself. But mark,—exposure to wet and cold alone will not do it. The Crimean experience proved this ; and so it is fouud to be daily aud nightly, in night trades and occupations, except in the case of the soldier. To know whether the conditions requisite to produce consumption and tubercular disease exist in barracks, it is only necessary to read the disgusting evidence given before the Barrack Committee, and the statements in this Report on the subject, or simply to consult the tables in the Appendix showing the amount of cubic space allowed to the men in barracks, and to the sick in military hospitals. It would be difficult to frame conditions more likely to generate such diseases than those to which soldiers are exposed in barrack-rooms. They are in fact the self-same conditions as have been determined by direct experiment to be necessary for the production of tubercular disease in animals. When a sufficient cause is found it is not necessary to look for another. 2nd. Zymotic diseases, namely, fevers, diarrheal, cholera, dysentery, he, are«known in civil life to be most intense in their activity where certain local conditions are present— First in prominence amongst these conditions, we have again overcrowding and defective ventilation,—the repeated breathing, in fact, of air already breathed, such air being further contaminated by moisture and exhalations from the skin. Next we have emanations proceeding from animal excretions, or from decaying vegetable matter together with moisture. The want of drainage and the foul state of the latrines and urinals in many barracks, as described in the Report, are sufficient illustrations of this class of causes. There are others of minor importance which need not be mentioned. Those enumerated are quite sufficient to account for most of the excess of zymotic mortality from which the army on home-stations suffers. If men returning from foreign service happen occasionally to be more susceptible to the operation of such causes, they will of course suffer more severely ; but allow- ance is made in the diagrams for even this contingency, as they do not exhibit any deaths occurring for the first six months after men have returned from foreign service. The next query is one which it is almost superfluous to put. It is whether there be any known means of diminishing this excessive mortality ; and whether there be any hope of reducing the lines of disease and mortality among the troops, as exhibited in these diagrams, to the same length as the lines for the civil population 1 The reply is, that the line of the soldier's mortality on home service should, to say the least of it, never have been longer than that of the civil population, and that it might be shorter. The parallelogram showing the mortality and disease among the civil population on Diagram G, is the very one, towards the reduction of which to smaller dimensions the whole sanitary procedure under every sanitary Act of Parliament is directed. It was the large dimensions of such parallelograms that led to the agitation which ended in the Legislature giving a sanitary code to England. And it is hardly credible that it should be necessary at the present day to advocate similar measures for the army. There is no reason why with proper sanitary measures the general health of the population should not be raised to the standard of the most healthy districts of the country, as indeed it has been in certain marked instances. And why should the health of the army on home service be any exception, seeing that the personal conditions of the soldier are so much more favourable? If this were done, and if our home army consisted of 100,000 Guards, we should save nearly 1,500 good soldiers per annum, who from all experience in other cases are as certainly killed by the neglects specified as if they were drawn out and shot. By referring back to Diagrams C & D, which represent the armj mortality at home and abroad, as compared with that of an English population at the same ages, we cannot fail to be struck with the immense loss of life entailed on the army, and the corresponding cost to the country from foreign service. This loss is much less than it was in former times. It has been diminished by various sanitary means ; and there is no reason whatever, why, if intelligent inquiry were instituted, aud proper sanitary precautions taken, all the lines of army mortality on those melancholy tables might not be materially shortened. Unfavourable as those diagrams are to the sanitary system, or rather want of system, in the British army, they exhibit results which might be considered as in the highest degree favourable when contrasted with the mortality from disease among the British troops in time of war. It is at such times that the excessively defective state of sanitary science and practice in the army becomes pre-eminently remarkable, and leads to the most disastrous results. It is right, however, to state that such defects are not confined to the British army. All armies during war have suffered from the neglect of very ordinary hygienic precautions, and some