made, which will doubtless be introduced into our armies for the benefit of our soldiers.

The employment of females as nurses, since the battle of Inkermann, has come to be deemed indispensable, in preparing food for the sick, and for the timely administration of medicine. In Catholic

countries, this devotion of the Sisters of Charity to the sick and wounded is no new thing. Protestant females are now laudably following their noble example.

The soldier should be obliged, when well, to bathe daily, in whole or in part, as circumstances allow, and forbidden to expose himself unnecessarily or unprotected to the dews of the night and sudden atmospheric changes especially when cold and moist or to the burning rays of the noon-day sun. His food should be good and properly prepared, soup being a salutary form, especially if there be any tendency to diarrhea; and total abstinence from alcoholic drinks be enjoined, except when employed as remedies. For drink, the soldier, when he can get it, should use hot coffee, tea or chocolate. Indeed, so valuable in addition to keeping warm at night -did Portio, the surgeon to the Emperor Leopold I. (1683), consider hot drinks in quenching thirst and otherwise conducing to the comfort and health of the soldier, that he recommends "all commanders to order a great kettle of water to be kept perpetually hot, whenever there is a fire kindled for other purposes, for the ready preparation of hot ptisans,"*

* See Med. Repository, New Series, p. 2, for many valuable suggestions for preserving the health of the soldier.

&c.

Alexander the Great is said to have lost more men from drinking (while they were heated) the cold waters of the lxus than he lost in battle.

Strict attention should be paid to ventilation and cleanliness in the camp and in the barracks-cesspools, sinks and filth of every kind being carefully and frequently covered with a sufficiency of earth to prevent exhalations, and proper drainage should be amply provided. If wood and water be at hand, the place of bivouac, as also of the hospital, should always be, if possible, upon an elevated and dry soil, away from crowded cities or marsh emanations, and in a pure air. And it should always be recollected that change of air, as of place, is of the most healthful influence; and the removal from an impure or over-crowded hospital to one more roomy and cleanly, is often the best and only valuable remedy to be directed for the sick and wounded, especially for those suffering under hospital gangrene, for the general and local treatment of which, Thompson's Lectures on Inflammation, and Hennen's Principles of Military Surgery, may be profitably consulted.

The precise form of discase which may occur in the campaign now opening before us, and the method of treatment, it is impossible to foresee with accuracy; but those of the warm season and of warm climates may be safely anticipated, and due preparations should be made for their treatment.

These, diseases of the summer and autumn, viz., diarrhoea, dysentery, typhoid and typhus fevers, are usually the scourges of the camp. These diseases

so run into each other that they are exceedingly apt to be misunderstood and improperly treated; the protracted diarrhoea of fever being treated as simple diarrhoea, when it may depend on an ulcerated state of the mucous membrane; or this latter condition, accompanied with mucous and bloody discharges, being regarded as simple dysentery - dysenteric symptoms following typhoid fever, or typhoid fever following dysentery, as in the Crimean war and American war of 1812- these diseases, as I once ventured to remark,* appearing to be allotropic forms of the same complaint, receiving their names from the seat and character of the diseased parts.

Whether typhoid and typhus fevers are only modifications of the same disease, is yet a question in the minds of some, while others regard the point as settled in the affirmative, the weight of the disease, as it were, falling upon different organs; or it may be that the different symptoms arise from the different conditions of the system at the time of attack "these underlying conditions," says a writer in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, "constituting the great difficulty in the management of disease in the time of war." "A full description of which complex states has never yet been given; but we know of no greater service that could be rendered to military medicine, than a comprehensive medical work on the diseases of the camp and army.' This same state of things is clearly discernible in the diseases of the campaigns of the American army, in

* See an Essay on Typhoid Fever, read before the Mass. Med. Soc.

1812, '13 and '14, as presented by Dr. Mann; and I know of no works which can be more profitably consulted for the treatment of the diseases of an army, on American soil, than this, and Coolidge's Medical Statistics of the U. S. Army.

As a prophylactic against intermittent fevers, quinine, in doses of two or three grains daily, has been used by the unacclimated in malarious districts, it is said, with success. It is possible this same article of the materia medica might be advantageously employed, and with the same intent, in the camp fevers of a more continued type.

We turn now from the head to the heart of the patriotic physician. The moral, like the physical powers, we all know, increase in energy and activity by exercise. Courage adds force to the muscle, while fear but depresses and enfeebles it. The cultivation of every noble and patriotic sentiment stimulates to action; and a knowledge that his property, liberty, life or independence is in danger, will render even a coward brave. In the defence of these, for himself and his posterity, the physician as a man, a citizen and a christian, is now called upon to act; and although he may not be liable to military service, I need not here say, that some of the most efficient civil and military officers in the Revolution, and in the war of 1812, were taken from our profession.

In reading Thatcher's Medical Biography, a physician cannot but be proud of the profession to which he belongs. Men with larger hearts or more generous and patriotic souls are to be found in no other

The bones of her

class; and I thank God, to-day, that I have the honor to be a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and that my humble name is to be found on the same catalogue with theirs; proud of the State that gave me birth, "whose history," in the language of Mr. Webster, "the world knows by heart. The past at least is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. sons, fallen in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever. And, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it; if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it; if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed to separate it from that union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand in the end by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm, with whatever vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin." With Mr. Webster, let us thank God that "Massachusetts stands to-day in the accumulated blaze of her past and present glory."

In popular governments, it has often been remarked, there are periods when public sentiment outruns