On the vital and sanitary statistics of our European army in India : compared with those of French troops, under like conditions of climate and locality / by James Bird.

  • Bird, James, 1797-1864.
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the vital and sanitary statistics of our European army in India : compared with those of French troops, under like conditions of climate and locality / by James Bird. 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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    tion, at Swansea, in August, 1848.* It is with earnestness he protests against partial deductions on this subject, and says, Exer- tions solely devoted to check intemperance, even if successful, can only palliate, but never remove, the evils that spring from climate. ** It may, likewise, by withdrawing attention from one great, and I *' believe the greatest cause of sickness, the noxious influence of particular localities, tend to retard the day, which I hope to see, when healthy sites having been selected for cantonments, the *' English soldier shaU enjoy, in India, almost as good health as in his native country. There can be hardly a difference of opinion as to the important part vice and intemperance play, iu increasing the sickness and mortality of English soldiers abroad, and for the imperative necessity of discontinuing the sale of spirits in the canteens of India, and of adapting the soldier's diet to season and latitude. Still these unremoved sources of the sickness and mortality there, are not the main causes of the increased ratios of both; as Miss Nightingale's summary of the evidence, in the stational returns, provesf that the miasmatic diseases of fevers, diarrhoea, cholera, and dysentery, are produced under elevated temperature, by bad water, misplaced lavatories and cesspools, bad drainage, filthy bazars, and overcrowding in barracks, huts, and sick-wards. But reverting to the mortality-rate, 69 per 1,000, as being hitherto the normal one for sickness and disease, in India, it is scarcely a true representation of the deduction that should be drawn, from the facts collected in the various statistical tables, published in the Appendix to the Commissioners' own Report, sufficient allowance not being made for the increased casualties of war, cholera, and invaliding, during the period of fifty-six years, 1800-56, assumed for the basis of some of the calculations in the report. Of these fifty-six years, twenty-five, including the Sikh war, 1845-46, and the Punjaub campaign, 1848-49, were periods of war and cholera; this last disease, according to Inspector-General Burke's Indiau returns, 1826-32, having for these six years increased the mortality 11-5 per 1,000 of the effective strength. J Besides the average difference of mortality, between the war-rate and that of peace, or 27 per 1,000, as shown in the following table for Madras troops, not having been deducted, while the rate of invaliding in India is included, and thought of no importance, the assumed average of death, and decre- ments from natural causes, is thus raised to 69. It was not without good reason, therefore, that the Secretary of State for India, in hia place in the House of Commons, the 23rd of July last, said, that * Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. xii, p. 34, 1849. t Royal Commissioners' Eeport, vol. i, folio, p. 347. I Quoted by M. Boudin, p. 52 of his Etat Sanitaire et Mortalit<5 des Armeet de Torre ct de Mer, Paris, 1846.