Appeal of the Executive Finance Committee in the city of New York.

Date:
[1861]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Appeal of the Executive Finance Committee in the city of New York. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    exposure of their commands. They have the best purposes. But they know not yet how to control the diet, the personal habits, the ventilation and police of their quarters and camps. They are studying war tactics, intent on making soldiers ; they rashly assume that intelligent men know how to take care of themselves ; and they are already finding camp-dysentery seiz- ing their regiments with a most threatening grasp. The most striking difference is already apparent in camps and troops, ac- cording as attention is given or denied, to the character of the water used, the situation of the camp with reference to the pre- vailing winds, and to the regulation of sinks and the cleansing of tents and quarters. Two regiments, separated by a quarter of a mile only, contained, in one camp not a dozen sick men ; in the other, 250 men more or less ill with dysenteric diarrhoea, and all because one was on a plain with decent well-water at at hand, the other in a wood, with a wretched puddle of black ditch-water as the only resource for drinking and cooking ! Do you ask, will medical men and officers, too, stand with folded arms and see this go on without immediate and energetic re- monstrance and action 1 They will, I reply, under some pro- vision of military etiquette, or some governmental obstacle— which it requires the boldness and decision of a power in con- fidential relations with the War Department, to put aside. We possess this power. But, gentlemen, I must spare you and the public and myself any further details. I am confident I have said enough to stim- ulate your utmost energies in supplying us with the means of immediately sending efficient men, experts in sanitary matters, into every camp and fortress, and of keeping them there under our direction, and fortified with all the authority of our Com- mission, to warn, instruct and befriend our officers and men, cooperating with the noble physicians who have so largely vol- unteered in this war, in preventing all the disease that can be