A letter on the sanitary condition of the troops in the neighborhood of Boston, addressed to his excellency the governor of Massachusetts / by S. G. Howe ; printed by request of the Advisory Committee.

  • Howe, S. G. (Samuel Gridley), 1801-1876.
Date:
1861
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter on the sanitary condition of the troops in the neighborhood of Boston, addressed to his excellency the governor of Massachusetts / by S. G. Howe ; printed by request of the Advisory Committee. 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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    any avoidable violation of sanitary laws, by whicli the soldier's health is broken, is a fraud upon him. These remarks may seem trite and superfluous, but experience shows that governments do not practically admit their responsi- bility to the soldier for the care and preservation of his health—his stock in trade. That our government ought to admit this responsibility, in part at least, is clear, because it undertakes to provide food, clothing, and lodging. These, especially the latter, are often unnecessarily bad and unwholesome; worse, certainly, than our volunteers from New England are accustomed to at home. Government ought to take as much care of the soldier's health as it does for its personal estate, its implements of war, or its horses, but it does not. For instance, it is well known that the use of straw between the ground and the. soldier's blanket is very important in a sanitary point of view ; it is useful, too, for horses. Now the United States army regulations allow 100 pounds a month for each cavalry horse, but only 12 pounds a month for each soldier. These straws show which way the wind blows. The government owns both the capital and the income of the horse's vital force, and economizes both ; but it owns only the income of the soldier's vital force, and neglects the capital. True, a horse needs more straw than a man, but not eight times as much. The point is, that he is provided, whenever it is possible, with all that is needful for his well-being, but the man is not. But if this instance is not well chosen, hundreds of others might be given to show what, indeed, the vital statistics of all modern armies show beyond question, that most governments do (unwittingly, per- haps) act towards soldiers as slaveholders are apt to do towards tlieir slaves when negroes are very cheap—they use them up by hard work and poor fare in eight years, rather than make thera last sixteen or twenty years by careful usage. Slaveholders hav® found out that this is poor policy when the prime cost is very high ; but government has not found out that, to the country, the costliest things are healthy and vigorous men. Let us glance at the imperfect statistics of mortality in our armies. In the Mexican war, 1,549 of our men were killed in battle or died of wounds, while 10,986 died of disease ; that is to say, for every man whom the Mexicans slew, disease slew seven. This, however, does not tell the whole story. A man slain in battle is one man less in our army; but for every man sick enough to be in the hospital there are