AMERICAN HYGIENICS.* As in the Crimean War, so in the

American Great Rebellion, the sympathy of individuals took an organized shape, and came to the aid of failing Governmental departments. The " United States Christian Commission" and the " United States Sanitary Com- mission" were the embodiments of the feelings with which the non- combatant relatives of the combatant Northerner watched his progress and provided for his wants ; whilst the " National Freedmen's Relief Association" looked after the welfare of the escaped and emancipated slaves. The United States Christian Commission filled up the places of absentee chaplains ; worked cheerfully and without jar with those who remained ; provided missionaries for the evangelization of soldiers, sometimes almost as ignorant of the Bible as our own public-school boys ; and pre- ceded at one time and supplemented at another the less elevated operations of the Purveying Department. Of it and of the Christianity which called it into existence it is not here and now our purpose to speak.

But the young Oxford clergymen who heard from Lord Robert Cecil, as happy undergraduates at a certain undignified electioneer- ing dinner at the Clarendon, that "every good Churchman must necessarily be a good Conservative," and who now teach at their curacies that every republican is necessarily a bad Christian, might learn something by reading the easily-accessible history of this commission. To judge fairly of the merits of any form of Christianity, even of a form prevalent, to quote again from a good Conservative, in " a failing democracy," it is necessary to take stock of its fruits.

And we may add that there are philosophers with views alien enough from those of Lord Cranbourne and his curate disciples, who might do well to study this self-same history of the work- ing of what they have been pleased to speak of as effete and moribund.

The lines of activity upon which the Christian Commission em- ployed itself, though somewhat multifarious, still conveyed pretty directly upon one point and object ; those of the Sanitary Com- mission were not less varied, and were even divergent, as well as heterogeneous. By dealing out food and clothing on the march and at the bivouac, its agents kept many an effective combatant from swelling the ranks of the non-effective ; and whilst doing this for the fighting men, it issued a commission of inquiry into the treatment of Northern prisoners, and has published an authen- tic report upon the truth of the over-true tales of Belleisle, Libby, and Andersonville. Upon quite another plane in its sphere of labour it remodelled the buildings, supplemented the deficiencies, and multiplied the comforts of the soldiers' hospitals; it came to the aid of the overtaxed paymaster and quartermaster by receiving the pay and arranging the route of the discharged invalid; and finally, it published and distributed broadcast "Essays on Mili- tary Hygiene and Therapeutics," to which, neglecting its other multifold activities, we propose herewith to draw the attention of our readers.

The first hundred and seventy pages of these Essays, as now published in a collected form under the editorship of Dr. Ham- moud, are devoted to the subjects of " Prevention," " Prophylaxis," and " Disinfection," and upon them the interest of the general reader, and indeed our own, will be principally concentrated. This year's fiery September has brought many a disbeliever in hygiene to hear gladly the sanitarian preacher; its easterly

• Military, Medical, and Bury's d Etsays, pnpa•ed for the United Slat s Sanitas7

Contmiuion. Edited by WillIlln A. Hammon•r. st.D.,Ouroon.aeneral 0, 8. Andy. ao. Puiladolph1s.: J. B. Lippluo tt mid Co. 1861.

breezes, bearing along with them on to every leeward promenade exhalations set free by the drying up of the drain-trap, have furnished the citizen in his afternoon airing with a pungent com- mentary on the tales of pestilence abroad and murrain at home which he glanced at in his morning paper. The provincial tri- bune of the people finds his heart failing him for fear, and, lay- ing aside his ordinary talk about the " French system of centrali- zation," and " arbitrary interference with individual property and vested rights" in the pestiferous, is ready to second a proposal for a rate, and for the purchase of a plan of main drainage from Mr. Bazalgette. When handy books of human laws relating to public health are being everywhere advertised in duodecimos at the somewhat high price of eighteen shillings, we think it may be well to draw attention to better and sounder sources of infor- mation as to nature's laws on the same subject than the flights of letters which appear daily in the newspapers can be held to furnish.

One indeed of the Essays re-published in this volume, which bears the title of " Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier," by Dr. van Buren, contains matter of interest, not only to sanitarians generally, as well as to barrack, lodging, and other house inspectors specially, but also to every sportsman save the battue-shooter, and to every tourist who scales the Alps and dis- regards the Times. An extract shall speak for us and for itself

"28. On a march take especial care of the feet. Bathe them every night before sleeping, not in the morning. Select a shoe of stoat soft leather, with a broad sole and heeL Prefer woollen socks. If the feet begin to chafe rub the socks with common soap where they come in contact with the sore places."

"29. An old soldier drinks and eats as little as possible while march- ing. The recruit, on the contrary, is continually munching the contents of his havresack and using his canteen; it is a bad habit, and causes more suffering in the end."

"30. The commencement of the day's march should be prompt. Nothing tires the men as hanging about the camp waiting for the word to start."

" 31. It is a great comfort to the men to halt for ten or fifteen minutes at the end of the first half-hour There should be a halt of ten or fifteen minutes at the end of every hour, with a rest of twenty minutes in the middle of the day for lunch. A. longer halt than this stiffens the men, and renders subsequent marching difficult. The best rule is to get through the day's march, and rest in camp, if possible, by 2 p.m."

More, however, depends at the present juncture on the com- munication of knowledge to municipal boards than to members of the Alpine Club ; and we can assure the stay-at-home sanitarian that nowhere will he find more useful or more clearly-expressed "Practi- cal Hints upon the Means of Arresting and Preventing the Preva- lence of Infectious Diseases," than in some fifty pages of the book now before us, written by Dr. Harris. These " Hints," it is true, were drawn up for use in war, but a soldier, after all, is but a man, his barrack is but a large and ordinarily overcrowded house, his hospital is but an aggregation of civilian sick rooms, and what is good for the one is good for the other also.

Dr. Harris begins an appendix to his " Hints" with the follow- ing words, p. 79 :—" That there can be no substitute for fresh air to meet the physiological requirements of respiration and health should be indelibly impressed upon every mind. Better that all substances at present employed as disinfectants and deodorants were at once prohibited by the Medical Department, than that such agents should practically tend to be regarded as substitutes for a pure atmosphere." In like manner, and in the like spirit, "Burn it," as we have heard, was the formula almost universally employed by a certain sanitary commissioner, when speaking of the removal of nuisances, now ten years ago, in Turkey and in the Crimea. But there are cases, and plenty of them, where that free access of air which perfect ventilation* ensures, and still more, where that freest intermingling and combination of oxygen which combustion and " Burn it " imply, are impossible, at all events for the moment. A few of the less well-known, albeit easily-available, remedies for such emergencies which Dr. Harris gives, we will here mention, supposing our English readers to be acquainted with some such pharmacopoeia of disinfectants as they may find in Dr. Hoffmann's " Report on the Chemical Pro- ducts in the Exhibition of 1862," and selecting therefore for . notice purposely such American remedies as we think are fallen into undeserved neglect and disuse in England. Such a remedy is common sulphate of lime, known even more fami- liarly as " gypsum," or " plaster of Paris." Its virtues are limited, it is true, to fixing in watery solution, and thus to eliminating from the air we breathe certain ammoniacal, certain sitlpinirettek and certain other noxious matters ; 801, though its sphere of action is thus limited, the sources whence it can-be

supplied are practically unlimited ; and, after all, it is not such a very small thing to keep the air around us free from substances which are to begin with excessively offensive, and which, if not always positively poisonous themselves, are yet supposed with much reason to serve as vehicles and furnish wings to other substances which are poisonous enough. Gypsum might be used with advantage to fix the enormous amount of ammonia which now runs, or rather flies, to waste in every guano ship and store ; indeed it is used for this very purpose in a few English stables, albeit the grooms are "sure that no good comes of such cheap stuff, which master gets from the gypsum yard at the workhouse." Of it it is amusing to find Dr. Harris speaking thus at p. 82 :—" The much vaunted French disinfectant, known as the disinfecting powder of Messrs. Corn6 and Demeaux, consists of about 94 per cent, of finely-ground gypsum, and 5 or 6 per cent. of coal tar, or the 'heavy oil of coal-tar.'" It is probably by a clerical and not by a chemical error that we find M'Dougall's powder spoken of in the next line as consisting of this same coal- tar combined " with the sulphate of lime," instead of the sulphites of that and the other alkaline earth, magnesia; but Dr. Harris is, we apprehend, strictly correct in saying that these substances, together with charcoal and silicate of alumina, or "porous clay," are "among the most valuable disinfectants, especially when large quan- tities of cheap and effectual articles of the kind are required." This quality of cheapness, however, does not tell, so far as we know, in favour of the sulphate of iron, " copperas," as against the chloride, and though Dr. Harris speaks of the two salts as of equal virtue and value, and though we read elsewhere (p. 20) in the book that copperas was largely used as a disinfectant by the French surgeons in the Crimea, we cannot but think that its liability, like other sulphates, to deoxidation when mixed with such matter as sewage, puts it at an inferiority when contrasted with the chloride, which Drs. Frankland and Hoffman recommend so strongly for our Lon- don use, and which is so readily and cheaply made with hydro- chloric acid and refuse iron, whether metal, ore, rust, or other oxide.

The expense, again, of the permanganates which, like Macdougal's Powder, seem likely to be useful in our cattle plague, is acknowledged as a drawback to their claims to take the first place among the radical, final, definitive, and direct oxidizers or destroyers of miasma. But from Dr. Har- ris's report it seems likely that bromine will take its place side by side in a sanitarian, as it already has in a morphological point of view, with the great indirect oxidizer chlorine, as, like that potent purifier, it is able not only to work in aqueous solution upon infusions of festering filth, but also to follow the evil sewage ex- halation, when set free into the air, and to catch and destroy them there, as Hoffmann has it, " on the wing." Iodine has been shown to possess somewhat, though not quite, similar merits, and if further observation and experiments should confirm those made and recorded by Dr. Goldsmith on bromine, the similarity in economical applicability of the three substances, chlorine, iodine, and bromine, will complete the picture of kinship with mixed resemblance and difference which their purely chemical history presents.

Whilst furnishing us thus with a new disinfectant, we observe that Dr. Harris has .left out of this enumeration one certainly of the most ancient and most easily procurable, as also of the most efficient, agents of the kind, sulphurous acid, to wit, the product of burning brimstone, the " sulphura cum tadis" of Roman lustre- tions. This must have been by oversight.

We cannot enter upon a notice of the purely Therapeutical essays, excellent though they'seem to be, which this book con- tains. But we must not omit to draw the attention of our readers generally, and specially that of Colonel Fremantle, to one of these, " On Pain and Anaesthetics," by Dr. Valentine Mott, a practi- tioner now of some seventy years of age, and recently chairman of the committee for inquiring into the "generous and humane" treatment of Northern prisoners by the " chivalrous South." The purport, style, and scientific basis of Dr. Mott's paper con- trast to the very greatest advantage with the barbarous expres- -eon of a barbarous ignorance which marked the notorious counter- blast to the use of chloroform which was issued to the English surgeons before the battle of the Alma. The name of the author of this document Dr. Mott kindly forbears to give, and we are glad to learn from his paper that the medical officers to whom the order was addressed also forbore to obey it. Records are given, Dr. Harris tells us, by Dr. Macleod of the employment of chloro- form in the Crimea "in 20,000 cases with only a single fatality."

It is pleasing to find that in spite of the efforts of English soldiers such as Colonel Fremantle, and of English civilians such as Messrs. Laird and Beresford Hope, the writers in this volume still retain some respect and affection for the old country, and show it by referring constantly and with something of deference to the precedents set by the English Sanitary Commission in the Crimean war. Thus Dr. Harris mentions the importation by that Commission of shiploads of peat charcoal, without hinting at the extravagance of carrying such a thing as charcoal thousands of miles to a country where it is in universal use as a combustible, and where each "old poetic mountain" is clothed from base to summit with box and dwarf oak.

The comparative statistics of the Crimean deaths by disease and by wounds respectively are in like manner taken as a standard by Drs. Post and Van Buren ; and as the recently published quarto volume by Dr. Chenu, physician to the French army, enables us to correct the figures which these gentlemen and the rest of the world had previously taken as authentic, we will here- with give the real relative numbers as exactly as they can be given in round numbers and in a couple of sentences. The effective land force sent by France to the Russian war amounted in all, from first to last, from the landing at Gallipoli to the evacuation of Kamieach, to some 300,000 men, more rather than less ; of this number about one-third perished ; 80,000 by disease, only 20,000 by wounds. The average English strength was from day to day 35,000 men ; of the whole number sent out as many as 20,000 perished, —15,000 by disease, 5,000 by weapons of war. These per-centages are less striking perhaps than the 13,000 deaths to the 17,000 admissions into the charnel hospitals which received those who did not die outright within the stockade at Andersonville, still they teach nearly as plainly the lesson that the pestilence which walketh in darkness slays many times more fighting men than the arrow which flieth by day. Indeed this lesson was so self-evident, and at the end of the Crimean war so universally acknowledged, that even the self-styled " members for the army" in the House of Commons, and the self-styled "soldier's friends" at the Horse Guards, were unable to prevent Lord Herbert from acting upon it. His sanitarian labours and those of Miss Nightingale have, by reducing the annual peace death-rate in the British Army from 17.5 per 1,000 to 8.5, and even 4.7, saved in the last ten years many more soldiers' lives than the Russians destroyed with all their tons of shell and shot and all their bullets and bayonets. This large saving of life was a result, and a great result, of our Crimean war, a war smaller in scale, and in most points less unhappy because smaller, than the one which has just ended. The Alma was a small action of a few hours as compared with the three days of Gettysburg ; the burning of Sweaborg contrasts to disadvantage with the taking of Charleston; incompetence and inexperience may have let slip the lives of hun- dreds at Scutari, but thousands were slain by deliberate cruelty at Andersonville ; the Hatti-Houmayoum of Abdul Medjid, even had it not been intended and proved to be a dead letter, would have effected less than the Emancipation Proclamation has already pro- duced. May this same ratio of excess be still maintained ; and as the American war was fought for more momentous stakes, and with a more appalling waste of human life, so may the lessons which may be, and indeed have been, learnt from its history prove proportionately more beneficent.