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U. S. SANITARY COMMISSION.
ZKTo.
G9.
STATEMENT
OF
THE OBJECT AND METHODS
OF THB
SANITARY COMMISSION,
Appointed by the Government of the United States, June 13, 1861.
PUBLISHED BY ITS DIRECTION.
NEW YORK:
Wm. C. Bryant & Co., Printers, 41 Nassau Street, corner or Liberty.
1863.
�\HfMT
At the last session of the Sanitary Commission, at Washington, a
resolution was adopted a That the subject of an appeal to the public
« for funds be referred to a Committee consisting of the Standing Com-
« mittee and the members of the Commission residing at Philadelphia and
“ Boston.” This Committee submits the following statement.
823 Broadway, New York, Dec. 7, 1863.
�SANITARY COMMISSION.
6 J Qli'i t
3NTO- 69.
£
The Sanitary Commission was created by Government in
June, 1861.
Like every other organ of our National energies it has been
steadily gaining strength ever since that time. The resources
that have been put at its disposal, and the work it has been
enabled to do, far exceed the most sanguine hopes of its founders.
Its aggregate receipts (including the money value of supplies
sent to its depots) are believed to exceed the income of any other
benevolent organization, American or Foreign, during the same
period.
The objects of this paper are, first, to state what has been
done with these great public benefactions; and, secondly, to
enable the People to determine whether it will or will not pro
mote the National cause, by enabling the Commission to continue
and extend its efforts.
A large portion of its resources has been expended on measures
for the prevention of disease. Their result is necessarily nega
tive and cannot be stated with certainty. The low rate of
mortality from disease in our Armies has unquestionably been
due in some degree to the warnings and labors of the Commission. But it is impossible to say how much other causes have
contributed to it, or to distinguish their effects from those due
to the work of the Commission.
It is certain that, in the summed of 1861, experienced Army
officers predicted that malaria, camp fever and dysentery would
within six months destroy fifty per cent, of the Volunteer Army
�then assembling. What the Commission did to avert this
calamity, will be stated hereafter, and must have contributed
—under Divine favor—to save our Armies from the ravages of
pestilence.
But it has done much work beside—with positive results that
can be definitely stated. The value of this work is recognized
by the Medical staff of the Army, and in Orders published by
prominent General officers, East and West.
*
Its direct and tan
* Department of the South, Headquarters in the Field, )
Morris Island, S. C., Sept. 9, 1863.
)
General Orders, No. 73.—The Brigadier-General commanding desires to make
this public acknowledgment of the benefits for which his command has been in
debted to the United States Sanitary Commission, and to express his thanks to the
gentlemen whose humane efforts in procuring and distributing much-needed articles
of comfort have so materially alleviated the sufferings of the soldier.
Especial gratitude is due to Dr. M. M. Marsh, Medical Inspector of the Com
mission, through whose efficiency, energy and zeal, the wants of the troops have
been promptly ascertained, and the resources of the Commission made available
for every portion of the army. By order of
Brigadier-General Q. A. Gillmore.
Ed. W. Smith, Asst. Adjutant-General.
OfficialIsrael S. Sealy, Capt. Forty-seventh N. Y. Volunteers, Acting Asst]
Adjutant-G eneral.
Headquarters Department of the Cumberland, )
Murfreesboro, Feb. 2, 1863.
f
The General commanding presents his warmest acknowledgments to the friends
of the soldiers of this army, whose generous sympathy with the suffering of the
sick and wounded, has induced them to send for their comfort numerous sanitary
supplies which are continually arriving by the hands of individuals and charitable
societies. While he highly appreciates and does not undervalue the charities
which have been lavished on this army, experience has demonstrated the importance
of system and impartiality, as well as judgment and economy, in the forwarding
and distribution of these supplies. In all these respects the United States Sanitary
Commission stands unrivaled. Its organization, experience, and large facilities for
the work, are such that the General does not hesitate to recommend, in, the most
urgent manner, all those who desire to send sanitary supplies to confide them to
the care of this Commission.
They will thus insure the supplies reaching their destination without wastage or
expense of agents or transportation, and their being distributed in a judicious
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gible results are many thousand lives saved, an incalculable
amount of suffering relieved or mitigated, smallpox and scurvy
checked in camps and hospitals by cargoes of vegetables, and by
timely supplies of vaccine—and succor, comfort and relief freely
given to hundreds of thousands when they could be obtained
from no other source. What the People have thus done for their
soldiers will long be held in honorable remembrance as a magni
ficent National act, not only of humanity and charity, but of
Patriotism also, for by preventing disease and speeding conva.
lescence, it has materially strengthened the National forces,
contributed to the success of the National cause, and added
a certain number of thousand bayonets to the available strength
.of the Army during every month of the past two years.
This is the great object for which the Commission exists. Its
work is, in the highest degree, humane and charitable, for it visits
and relieves the sick, destitute, and miserable. But its ultimate
end is neither humanity nor charity. It is to economise for the
National service the life and strength of the National soldier.
The Commission works in a spirit and on a system as practical
as that of the War Department, and it submits the value of its
system and its work to the practical common sense with which
the People decide on whatever concerns the public interest.
It asks the confidence and support of patriotic and far-sighted
men on two special grounds. One is the nationality and catho
licity of its work as compared with that of State and local or
manner, without disorder or interference with the regulations and usages of the
army.
This Commission acts in full concert with the Medical Department of the Array,
and enjoys its confidence. It is thus enabled with a few agents to do a large
amount of good at the proper time. Ever since the Battle of Stones’ River, it has
distributed a surprisingly large amount of clothing, lint, bandages and bedding, as
well as milk, concentrated beef, fruit, and other sanitary stores, essential to the
recovery of the sick and wounded.
W. S. Roseceans, Major-General Commanding Department.
�6
ganizations. Not a word of censure or of disrespect should be
spoken of these agencies. Many of them do great good within
their own sphere. But their sphere is provincial, not National,
and their object is the relief of some single class of National sol
diers, to the exclusion of all others. They assist men, not be
cause they now belong to the National army, but because they
formerly belonged to some particular State, county, or neighbor
hood. This distinction between their avowed object and that of
the United States Sanitary Commission should be clearly under
stood.
The Commission studiously ignores sections and State lines,
and knows soldiers from Missouri or from Massachusetts only as
in the National Service. It declines all contributions for
the exclusive benefit of a single class, and impartially applies
its resources, received from East or West, to the aid and relief of
the National Army East and West, asking only where they are
most sorely needed. It is thus daily teaching thousands a prac
tical lesson on the blessings of National Unity, which will not
be forgotten when they return to the duties of civil life. The
Maryland or Illinois volunteer who has been rescued from mis
ery and the prospect of death, by clothing, food, stimulants and
chloroform, that came to him on the field or in some ill-pro
vided hospital, through the Commission, from some remote cor
ner of New England or Pennsylvania, is likely for the rest of his
days to think of himself less as a Marylander or as a Western
man, and more as a citizen of the United States; and though he
will not value his State less, he will love his country more.
Even rebel prisoners, helped through their sickness and destitu
tion by the stores of the Sanitary Commission, carry back to
their Southern homes new and enlarged views as to the resources
and the generosity of the People against which they have fought
under coercion, or misled by systematic falsehood.
,
The Commission seeks to direct the overflowing sympathy of
�7
the People with the Army into a National channel. It calls on
the women of New England to clothe soldiers at Alexandria and
Chattanooga, and on the West to aid the Army at New Orleans
or Port Royal, wherever supplies are most wanted or can be
most economically carried. Its influence on its contributors is
no less National than on its beneficiaries. That of local or
State agencies tends to foster, in contributor, agent and bene
ficiary alike, the very spirit of sectionalism and “ State-isk-ness”
to which we owe all our troubles.
The Commission is, moreover, the only organization for Army
relief, local or general, that works on a system carefully con
formed and subordinated to that of the Army, and through,
agents specially trained and permanently employed. The ob
jection that has been made to its employing permanent salaried
officers, instead of unpaid volunteers, giving a fortnight or a
month each, to the work of Army relief, is untenable and short
sighted. It has to distribute millions of dollars worth of
bulky stores over an area of many thousand square miles.
This is, in a merely business point of view, a work of seri
ous magnitude. It is, moreover, a work of special delicacy
and difficulty, because it must be so done as not to inter
fere with the machinery of the Army, or weaken the reliance of
the men upon their officers. Without a corps of agents who un
derstand their work, give their whole time to it, and are bound
to perform definite service during a definite period, loss, waste,
and misapplication of supplies are inevitable. This branch of
the Commission’s work may fairly be compared with that of our
largest railroads and express companies, and is at least as worthy
of being well and economically done. But how long would any
railroad corporation keep out of the hands of a Receiver, if
it confided its freight business to volunteers over whom it
could exercise no real control, and who felt themselves at full
liberty to leave its service whenever they tired of it, or when-
�8
iTO * '! f ■
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ever they thought themselves overworked or unfairly criticised,
instead of employing superintendents, clerks, and porters, en
gaged in the usual way and on the usual terms ? The poetry of
the Relief Agent’s work may be spoiled if he receive a salary,
but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, its practical value to
the Army is doubled. It would be easy to name splendid ex
ceptions to this rule, but they are only exceptions.
The work of Army relief, like every other practical and seri
ous business, requires skill which can be got only by expe
rience, and men cannot, as a general rule, be secured for service
long enough to acquire experience and skill, unless they receive
moderate pay. But the difference between a skilled and an un
skilled agent is equal to a difference of at least fifty per cent, in
the amount of practical good each can do the soldier with the
stores entrusted to him, and it costs the Commission less than
two per cent, on the estimated value of its supplies to distribute
them through skilled salaried agents, instead of unskilled volun
teers. This is not all. The volunteer is necessarily unacquaint
ed with the complex regulations under which Government sup
plies the wants of the Army, for thorough familiarity with their
practical working can be acquired only by months of actual con
tact and experience. He cannot tell, therefore, when called
upon to relieve a Regiment or a Hospital, whether its officers
have done or have neglected their duty, and whether they can
or cannot promptly obtain what is needed through regular offieial channels. His impulses prompt him of course instantly to
relieve the suffering he sees before him. He distributes his sup
plies at once, asking no questions, and goes home thankful that
he has been enabled to relieve so much destitution and dis
tress. But he has too often been merely covering up the
short-comings of some inefficient Officer paid by Government to
do precisely the same thing, and has thus shielded him from
■
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exposure and dismissal, and done the Army in the long run
more harm than good.
The Commission avoids this danger. It reserves its sup
plies for the cases of accidental failure, which must from time
to time occur in the working of every military system, and
especially of one newly organized on so vast a scale as ours, and
seeks rather to strengthen the official agencies through which
Government provides for the army, than to set itself up as a
rival source of supply, and thus weaken the confidence of the
men in their military superiors.
Finances
oe the
Commission.
The Treasurer of the . Commission has received in cash from
his appointment, in June, 1861, up to and including December
7th, 1863:......................................... ,............
From Maine......................................
$17,720 33
“ New Hampshire.................................................
1,701 44
“ Vermont.............................................................
2,035 15
“ Massachusetts........ ................ .>...................
. 48,548 86
“ Connecticut.............................
5,181 35
“ Rhode Island......................................................
8,068 30
“ New England (Statesnot discriminated).......
6,683 75
New York............................................................ 160,042 58
“ New Jersey.........................................................
3,170 88
“ Pennsylvania.................................................
11,699 18
“ Delaware ...........................................................
765 00
“ Maryland...........................................................
1,733 00
“ Washington, D. C..............................................
2,333 08
J “ Ohio ...................................................................
2,700 00
.1.
“
“
“
Michigan.............................................................
Illinois.................................................................
Kentucky...........................................................
578 00
546 25
6,166 45
�10
«
From Indiana..........................
500 00
“ Minnesota...........................................................
45 00
“ Nevada Territory.............................................. 54,144 75
“ California........................................................... 526,909 61
“ Oregon............................................................... 26,450 78
“ WashingtonTerritory........................................
7,258 97
“ Idaho...................................................................
2,110 46
({ Vancouversand San Juan Islands...................
2,552 68
“ Honolulu.............................................................
4,085 00
“ Santiago de Chili................................................
3,688 84
“ Peru.....................................................................
2,002 00
“ Newfoundland...................................
150 00
“ Canada...............................................................
439 48
“ England and Scotland........ . ........................... .
1,150 00
“ France..................................................................
2,750 00
“ Turkey..................................................................
50 00
“ China..................................................................
2,303 93
“ Cuba.....................................................................
23 00
“ Unknown som’ces...............................................
3,192 88
Making in the whole the sum of......................... $919,580 98
Large amounts have been raised by the Branches of the
Commission beside their contributions to its Central Treasury,
included in the foregoing statement. The money receipts of the
Philadelphia branch for instance, over and above what it has
contributed to the general Treasury, up to December 4th, 1863,
have been $117,097 75.
These local receipts have been expended chiefly in the pur
chase of supplies forwarded to the depots of the Commission at
Washington, Louisville, Morris Island, New Orleans, &c., or to
its relief agents in the field, and in the local work of Special
Relief.
. .. .. j
..
�11
/J To the large amounts thus raised at our principal cities, must
be added the aggregate of the smaller sums which innumerable
societies, “sewing circles,” snd other patriotic organizations
affiliated with the Commission or its various branches have
spent in the purchase of material to be converted into Hospi
tal clothing, and for other like purposes. This aggregate may
never be precisely ascertained, but it doubtless far exceeds what
has been received by the Branches and the Central Treasury
together.
There must also be taken into account the value of the trans
portation given the Commission for its bulky stores, either freely
or at greatly reduced rates, by Railroad and Express Companies,
and of the free use it enjoys of many of our Telegraph lines.
These are equivalent to so much money saved its treasury for
the benefit of the Army, through public confidence in its effi
ciency and National scope. This amount can only be estimated
at present, but it is immense. On two Western Railroads alone,
it is understood to exceed two hundred thousand dollars.
The money value of the material supplies dispensed by the
Commission will be considered hereafter. Leaving them out of
view, it is evident' that the public bounty it has organized and
directed in aid of the National Army must be estimated in terms
of millions.
But it enjoys the confidence also of the Military authorities.
Having been ever on its guard against the danger (inherent in all
attempts to aid the Army through outside unofficial agencies,)
of weakening the sense of responsibility among officers, and in
terfering with discipline among the rank and file, it is known to
Military and Medical officers as an auxiliary on which they can
call with entire safety. It has, therefore, as a general rule, the
benefit of their cordial co-operation. The economical value of
their assistance, especially in all field operations, is inestimable.
It often makes all the difference between life-saving success and
�12
utter waste and failure. Quartermasters feel authorized to help
forward supplies entrusted to the recognized agents of the Com
mission when they decline giving facilities to unknown and
irresponsible relief agents. After a great battle such transpor
tation cannot be bought with money, though the lives of thou
sands may depend upon it, and the lives of many thousands
have been saved because help was sent them through the Sani
tary Commission, and because the system of the Commission
is known to harmonize with that of the A rmy.
The confidence thus reposed in the Commission economizes
its resources in many other ways, and enables it to use them
with special advantage and effect. For instance, Government
supplies ordinary rations to the hundreds of thousands of men
who are relieved in the “ Homes ” of the Commission. It often
furnishes transportation, guards for depots and for wagon trains,
and details of men for special service in aid of the Commission.
*
Without this help the “ Special Relief” system, which has done
what no Government system could undertake, and what we
could not have endured to see left undone, would have cost four
fold what it has. The special advantages thus secured to the
Commission through the confidence reposed in it by the Public
* Head-Quartbrs Department op the Cumberland, )
Stevenson, Ala., August 19th, 1863,
j
Sir,—The General commanding authorizes the use of half a car daily for the
shipment of sanitary stores by the United States Sanitary Commission, from Nash
ville to such points South as may be desired. This letter, if exhibited to the
Quarter-Master at Nashville, will procure you the transportation at all times, unless
the exigencies of the service should make it necessary temporarily to suspend the
permission. General directions to ship nothing but government stores, will not
affect this permit. Should it be necessary to suspend it, special direction will be
given.
I am, very respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
C. Goddard,
Lieut. Col. and A. A. G.
Dr. A. N. Reed,
U. S. Sanitary Commission.
mA -
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and by the Army, make every dollar contributed to its Treasury
do the work of two.
Though the resources controlled by the Commission have been
very large, its work has demanded them all. It has repeatedly
been obliged to purchase supplies, after its depots were ex
hausted, for tens of thousands of wounded men. This includes
rebel prisoners in our hands, for it has been found practically
impossible to pass by on the other side when any citizen of the
United States was suffering from the casualties of war.
The disbursements of the Central Treasury for the eight
'-months ending December 1st, 1863, have been as follows:—
*. ..»j
April................... ............................. $29,142
May.................... ............................. 36,315
June................... ............................ 54,623
July.................... ............................. 92,020
August.............. ............................ 40,507
September ..... ............................ 28,470
October.............. ............................. 30,191
November........ . ............................. 49,845
57
09
21
86
07
35
81
87
i'
-
'll
$361,116 83
or on an average a little over forty-five thousand dollars a month.
GENERAL ORGANIZATION OF THE COMMISSION.
The Commission meets at Washington quarterly, and holds
special sessions whenever they are required. During the inter
vals between its sessions its affairs are administered by its chief
executive officer, the General Secretary, and by a standing com
mittee of five of its members, which meets daily in New York.
Two “ Associate Secretaries ” are stationed one at Louisville
and a second at Washington. The former is charged with the
work of the Commission west of the Alleghanies, the latter east
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•—including our positions on the Rebel Seaboard, and the city of
New Orleans. These Associate Secretaries, have the supervision
of all Sanitary Inspectors, Relief Agents, &c., within their re
spective departments, receive constant reports from them, and
direct their labors wherever comparison of these reports indicates
that they are most wanted. Each is in communication also with
the Branches of the Commission, and through them with the
local Societies that send their stores to the branch and central
depots and makes requisitions for these stores from time to time
as they are needed. In case of pressing emergency he pur
chases supplies or calls by telegraph for their purchase at the
point from which they can be most speedily forwarded.
Each Associate Secretary is thus kept informed of the relative
wants, of every regiment within his department, and as to the
particular depots from which supplies of any particular class
can be most promptly and economically forwarded. No State
Agent can thus view the whole national field. He may do great
service, but he can never be quite sure that he would not have
done the whole army and the whole country much more service
if he had worked somewhere else.
The subordinate agents of the Commission are employed on
duties which can mostly be classed under the heads of Sanitary
Inspection, Army Relief, and Special Relief. They all report
to one or the other of the two Associate Secretaries already men
tioned, except the Inspectors. These report to a third Associate
Secretary, who is also Chief of Sanitary Inspection.
There are several hundred “ Associate members ” of the Com
mission, selected as prominent and loyal citizens, or as experts in
Sanitary science. Many of them have attended its sittings, and
aided it with their counsel. Under their auspices the numerous
Branches of the Commission have been established in our prin
cipal cities. These admirable and efficient organizations pro
vide for the local work of Army relief, and raise funds and
�15
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fl *r •
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'
secure supplies for the general objects of the Commission. Each
has its own Treasurer.
*
The object of this paper is to state the work and the wants of
the Commission itself, but it is impossible to pass over, without
mention, the services rendered by its Branches. The final his
tory of the Commission, and of the great popular movement of
munificence and humanity that distinguishes this war from all
others, will show how much these organizations at Chicago,
Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York,f Pittsburgh, Brooklyn,
Cincinnati, Boston, and elsewhere, have done in addition to the
work of the Central Commission. Without them the Commis
sion would have been a comparative failure. The work of the
Commission and of its branches cannot be so analyzed as to
show exactly how much of the aggregate result should be cred
ited to either. To attempt such analysis would overload this
statement with details. But its readers must bear in mind, that
the results it sets forth as accomplished “ by the Commission,”
are in many cases largely due to the energy of its branches,
the Commission itself acting merely as a balance-wheel to
secure the harmony and the impartial Nationality of their
work.
The financial centre of the Commission is at New York. Its
Treasurer acts under the supervision of the Standing Committee,
and makes no payments without its authority.
SANITARY INSPECTION OF CAMPS, POSTS, AND HOSPITALS.
This was the chief object contemplated by the Commission
when it was created by Government. As has already been stated,
our Armies were during the summer of 1861, in serious danger
of destruction by epidemic disease. Modern Sanitary science was
* See Appendix B.
f The Women’s Central Association of Relief, New York.
�16
hardly recognized in the ancient regulations of the Medical Bu
reau. Its officers could not be expected to go beyond the strict
line of official duty when that duty was more than quadrupled.
The first business of the Commission therefore was to awaken
general attention to the Sanitary interests of the Army, and to
do what it could to improve the Sanitary condition of camps,
quarters, hospitals, and men.
It sent out Medical Inspectors forthwith to warn inexperi
enced officers of the peril to which filth, bad ventilation and
bad food exposed their men and themselves. It brought
to bear upon Government the influence of the medical profes
sion throughout the country, effected the extension and invigo
ration of the Medical Bureau, and secured the express recogni
tion of the prevention of disease, no less than its cure, as among
the functions of the Medical Staff. Government now employs
its own Sanitary Inspectors and does a certain portion of the
preventive work which the Commission did during the first year
of its existence. But the Commission still keeps up an Inspec
torial Corps auxiliary to that of Government, for the latter is
numerically unequal to its great work, and there are special
causes beside that have thus far interfered with its efficiency.
Each Inspector on visiting a Camp or Post puts himself, in
the first place, in communication with its Military authorities
and asks their co-operation in his work. This being secured,
he proceeds to investigate the condition of the men in every
particular that bears on their liability to disease, and the suffi
ciency of the remedial agencies within their reach. He inquires
into the quality of their water-supply, food, cooking and clothing
—the ventilation and the cleanliness of their camp or quarters—
the position of their latrines—the provision for the removal and
destruction of refuse and offal—the equipment of their field or
post hospital—their ambulance service—the competency of
their medical officers—the salubrity or insalubrity of their
�Camp-site or post—the sufficiency of their bedding and blankets,
the character of the diseases that have prevailed among them,
and the precautions thus indicated. On these points he advises
the medical and military authorities of the Corps as a Sanitary
expert. His inspection generally discloses something that can
be done to promote the health of the command. He finds, for
instance, that there are tendencies to malarious disease that5
call for quinine as a prophylactic, or tendencies to scurvy,
that require supplies of fresh vegetables, or that there is
a deficiency of stimulants, bedding, articles of hospital diet, or
disinfecting material. If the want, whatever it is, can be
promptly supplied through the regular official channels, he sees
that this is done—but if it cannot, or if (as is often the case)
something is required which Government does not undertake to
supply, he calls on the Relief Department of the Commission
which supplies it according to its ability. If the officer who
should obtain it be inexperienced in requisitions and supply
tables, the Inspector is able to assist him. If the defect arise
from corruption or incapacity, he reports the fact. It sometimes
happens that the health of a Camp is endangered by want, not
of supplies, but of some work for which authority cannot at
once be obtained. In this case money is appropriated by the
Standing Committee, or in case of emergency by the Associate
Secretary on the Inspector’s report. The Commission has done
much work of this class. It has improved the ventilation of
hospitals, dug wells to improve the water-supply of camps, built
temporary hospitals and quarters, to replace unwholesome and
dangerous buildings, furnished and fitted up Hospital Transports
and converted ordinary Railroad cars into Railroad Ambu
lances, with cooking apparatus and store rooms, and litters hung
on springs, in which thousands of men with fractured limbs
have travelled thousands of miles without suffering or injury.
The results of every Inspection are noted on blanks provided
2
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for the purpose, and are severally reported. Each report covers
about two hundred distinct points affecting the sanitary condi-j
tion and wants of the force inspected. More than 1800 of these
reports have been accumulated. They are digested and tabu-lated, as received, by a competent actuary. It is believed that
the body of military and medical statistics thus collected is
among the largest and most valuable in existence. It can hardly
fail to furnish conclusions of the utmost importance to sanitary
science.
The Commission employs other agencies also for the preven
tion of disease. It urges measures of sanitary reform on the
attention of Government. It furnished material for the vaccination of thousands of men at a time, now happily past, when the
Medical Bureau was unable to supply the tenth part of what
was needed, and issued what it had only after a fortnight’s delay.
It has thus stayed the ravages of smallpox in regiments crowded
on board transports, after that disease had actually begun to
spread among their men.
It has done much beside to protect our soldiers against this
peril. During the first year of the war, for instance, all cases of
“ eruptive disease ” in one of our most important military depart
ments were consigned indiscriminately to a single Hospital, from
which men were “ discharged cured ” of mumps or measles, and
rejoined their regiments to sicken and die of smallpox con
tracted in this “ hospital,” so called, and to infect and kill their
comrades. It was through the persevering remonstrance and
protest of the Commission that this murderous abuse was at
last corrected.
*
The Commission has also circulated throughout the Army,
and especially among the Medical Staff’, many hundred thousandd
copies of its medical documents. This series now numbers^,
* It is hardly necessary to say that all this occurred before the appointment of
the present able and efficient Surgeon General, Dr. '\illiam A. Hammond. ’
�10
•
eighteen publications, each devoted to some special point of
prevention or cure. Some of them are addressed to the indi
vidual soldier, but the great majority are for the use of the Medical
Staff, and relate to the prevention or treatment of the diseases
t6 which camps are specially exposed, and to sundry operations
of Military Surgery with which it cannot be expected that Sur
geons recently appointed from civil life should be generally
familiar. These monographs have been prepared at the request
of the Commission, by some of the most eminent Physicians and’
Surgeons of the country. Embodying, in a condensed form, the
Idlest results of science, they have been of great use to our Army'
Surgeons, who often encounter cases1 for which their pre
vious- practice hasnot specially prepared them, and who have
neither medical libraries nor opportunities for consultation.
The Commission institutes special Inspections also from time
to time, outside of its general Inspectorial system. It employs
medical agents to look into the condition of such Camps or Hos
pitals as seem to require special attention, and to ascertain and
report the wants of our armies during or immediately after a
trying campaign. Within the past year it has made a thorough
inspection of all General Military Hospitals, East and West,
employing for this purpose Medical practitioners of the highest
professional standing; ‘ Their recommendations of improvement
ufrour Hospital system and its administration1 havebeen sub- '
mitted to the proper authorities.•'
The Relief Agents of the Commission are'not expressly ch arged
*
with the office of Sanitary inspection, but their reports and journals, sent in at short intervals, help to keep the Commission informed of the condition of the Army, and of the measures required to’-maintain it in health.; at-every point from Annapolis to Hew ’
Orleans.As has been already stated, it is from the nature of the case”
impossible accurately to estimate how many men have been'saved
�2Q
from death or disease, and how much efficiency has been econo
mized for the country by this preventive service, for though the
results of the treatment of disease can be more or less accurately
recorded, the result of measures for its prevention cannot be
stated with any kind of certainty. The only attainable data are
the percentage of disease among men to whom such preventive
measures have been applied, and among those to whom they
have not. Though inferences from a comparison of the two are
not absolutely to be relied on, (because we can never be quite
sure that the conditions of any two cases have been precisely the
same), a comparison of the mortality rates of our Army with
those of the British Armies in the Crimea and during the Pe
ninsular W ar will nevertheless throw some light on the ques
tion.
The average annual loss of the whole British Army during
the Peninsular War was one hundred and sixty-five men out of
every thousand. Of these one hundred and thirteen died by
disease or accident.
'
From 1803 to 1812 the average annual death-rate of the whole
British Army “ abroad” was 80 per 1,000—71 by disease and
accident, and 9 by wounds in action.
In July, August and September, 1854, the British Army in the
Crimea lost at the rate of two hundred and ninety-three men out of
every thousand per annum. Ninety-six per cent, of this loss was
from disease. During the next three months, October, November
and December, 1854, their loss was at the annual rate of five hun
dred and eleven out of every thousand, seven-eighths of which
loss was by disease. In January, 1855, it was at the rate of 1174
per 1,000 per annum, 97 per cent, of this loss being due to dis
ease, During the first three months of that year it was at the
annual rate of 912 per 1,000, and ninety-eight per cent, of the
loss was due to disease.
Up to May 18, 1862, our armies had lost at the rate of fifty-
�21
three per thousand per annum, and only forty-four per cent, of
that loss was by disease and accident.
*
■ In estimating the value of these figures, it must be remembered
that the conditions under which our soldiers serve have been gen
erally unfavorable. Their field of operations includes large districts
quite as insalubrious as any part of Spain, Portugal or the Crimea.
There has at all times (and especially during the first year of the
War) been among them a large proportion of half-disciplined
recruits and of inexperienced officers, while the soldiers of
Great Britain in the Peninsula and the Crimea were regulars
under high discipline, and commanded by professional officers.
The Commissariat and the Medical Department of the British
Army were parts of a system long established and matured. In
May, 1862, ours were newly organized (for the purposes of this
War), and not yet in perfect working order. The Peninsular and
Crimean Armies had therefore material advantages over our own.
Yet we have lost far fewer men by disease. Even on Morris Island
and in the pestilential swamps of the lower Mississippi our loss
by disease has been smaller than that of any Army about which
we have authentic information. For this great fact—equivalent
to the addition of hundreds of millions to our National resources
—the Nation can never be sufficiently thankful. No human
agency could have ensured it. Though the average intelligence
and culture of our common soldiers are beyond those of any
army ever yet put into the field, and though the Medical Staff
- and the Sanitary Commission have worked diligently in their
respective spheres, a blessing so great, exceptional and unhoped
for can be attributed to none but the Highest cause, f
* See Preliminary Report on the Mortality and Sickness of the Volunteer Forces,
by E. B. Elliott, Actuary.
f The last report of the Secretary of War, as just published in the daily papers,
states the number of patients in General Hospital, June 30, 1863, as 9.1 per cent.,
and in Field Hospital 4.4 per cent, of the whole national forces—and that of this
�22
DEPARTMENT OF ARMY RELIEF.
This work was not at first contemplated by the Commission.
But the need of some central agency, to prevent the most dis
tressing waste of supplies, and the most mischievous interference
with Army discipline by irresponsible volunteer agents, was soon
apparent. Boxes and bales of life-saving stores were rotting and
perishing in railroad depots because wrongly directed, or because
the Regiment for which they were intended had changed its po
sition. Regiments were throwing away superfluous delicacies,
while others were suffering for want of necessaries. The bounty
of the People was manifestly losing half its practical value be
cause unsystematically distributed, and system could be secured
only through some central and National organization.
The Commission therefore allied itself with Army Relief As
sociations and Societies already existing, promoted their forma
tion where they did not exist, and undertook the great work of
systematizing and economizing the public effort to aid the Army.
This was then and still is a work of the first necessity. For, though
no Government has ever provided for its Army so liberally as
ours, and no People has ever given so liberally to supplement
what Government does, both People and Government are still
unable to do all that should be done, and men are still dying
every day who could be saved from death at the cost of a
few dollars. System and economy in the application of the pub
lic bounty, munificent as it is, are therefore indispensable. It
must be applied so as not only to do good, but to do the greatest
good to the greatest number, and the Commission endeavors so
to apply it through its Army Relief Department.
The branches of the Commission daily receive supplies of
aggregate °f 13-5 per cent., 11 were cases of sickness and 2.5 of wounds or other
casualties. This is a most gratifying statement; especially when contrasted with
the sickness-rates of foreign armies in the field and of our own during the Mexican
war.
�23
almost every kind from the sewing societies, Soldiers’ Aid Socie
ties, and other patriotic organizations that exist under various
titles in almost every town and village of the North. The num
ber of these organizations is exceedingly great. During August
last more than one hundred and twenty contributed to the
Chicago branch alone. More than twelve hundred have sent
supplies to the New York branch. From the depots of these
branches the Commission draws the supplies that are distributed
through its relief agents.
The issues of these depots are not confined to goods received
from auxiliary societies. The branches also purchase supplies
on a large scale, especially in cases of emergency, as after a great
battle. They have thus expended several hundred thousand
dollars, the proceeds of which have gone directly to the relief of
the army. The cargoes of ice, for example, sent to the hospitals
of Morris Island and Hilton Head, by the Boston branch, at the
expense of the Central Treasury, have been of inestimable value,
not merely to the individual soldier^ whose suffering they have
alleviated, but to the country in expediting his convalescence
and return to duty.
The general fund is used for like purposes. Up to De
ember 1, 1863, the central Treasury at New York has
expended more than a quarter of a million in the purchase of
hospital clothing, chloroform, medicines, stimulants, beef stock,
farinaceous food, and other material for army relief. This is over
and above what it has spent in sending surgeons, medical dressers,
and skilled nurses to the field.
The methods adopted for the systematic distribution of these
stores have been carefully considered. They work well and
economically, and are cordially approved by the military and
medical authorities of the army.
*
Losses by miscarriage and by
* Surgeon-General’s Office,
Washington Citt, D. C., February 13th, 1863.
Sir,—In reply to your communication of the 11th inst., 1 am directed to inform
�the casualties ot war (the capture of wagons by the enemy, for
instance,) have been exceedingly small. Their estimated amount,
all told, is less than ten thousand dollars.
For each great division of the army the Commission provides
a chief sanitary inspector and a superintendent of field relief.
If the force be stationary (as at Aquia Creek during the winter
of 1862-3, at Vicksburg, and now on Morris Island,) a permanent
lodge is established near its headquarters as a relief agency or
semi-governmental hospital, and depot of supplies. If the force be
in motion, supplies are issued from wagon trains or from steam
boats, of which the. commission has three, one in the Eastern
Department and two in the Western. Transportation is some
times paid for by the Commission, and sometimes put at its
disposal by the Quartermaster’s Department. There are now
(November, 1863,) five relief agents attached to the Army of
the Potomac, one for each army corps, each at the front in
charge of a wagon train moving with its own corps, and kept
constantly supplied from the W ashington depot. Each is cer
tainly saving one man’s life every day, and probably more.
Lodges and depots are also established at every important
hospital centre and convalescent camp to do such works of mercy
as are not provided for by regulation, and cannot, therefore, be
officially done at all. Each of these lodges and depots is, in fact,
the office of a volunteer surgeon, quartermaster, and commissary,
you that the Sanitary Commission is believed to be the best repository, and
distributor of the people’s bounty; giving the greatest certainty of good to the
soldier, with the least interference with the surgeons of the hospitals.
Very respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
By order of the Surgeou-General,
C. C. Bynnes,
Assistant-Surgeon,
.r. W. 11. Hadley,
U. S. Army.
Washington, D. C.
�23
sent there by the people, to provide for accidental failures in the
work of its government officials.
Pursuant to the settled policy of the Commission, its relief
agents are instructed to dispense supplies to camps and hospitals
through the regular military channels of supply whenever they
can possibly do so. If they have shirts and blankets for a ragged
regiment they distribute them, as a general rule, through its
officers, and thus make the supplies effective, not only to relieve
the soldier, but to maintain his confidence in his military
superiors.
• ■ • . 'i,,
It has been said that surgeons and other officers misappropriate
the stores thus put within their reach. Every great army must
include a certain per centage, larger or smaller, of dishonesty and
baseness, but such cases, if there have been any at all, are most
exceptional in ours. The Commission has diligently followed up
every rumor of the kind that has reached it, often employing
special detective agents for the purpose, but in no one case has
the report been confirmed. In most it has been conclusively dis
proved. Such stories originate in many ways. A soldier, for
instance, sells or loses a blanket issued by the Commission, and
marked with its stamp. The blanket finds its way to some second
hand shop in Washington or Cincinnati, and somebody who sees
it there sets afloat an “ authentic” report that goods sent the Com
mission for army relief are sold either by the Commission itself
or by army officers. Or a surgeon uses the hospital stores of the
Commission for his own relief when ill, thereby practically,
though indirectly, applying them to the benefit of his patients,
and thus creates a rumor that army surgeons generally live on
beef tea and brandy meant for hospital use. There is no proof
that a dollar’s worth of the people’s bounty has been thus per
verted. If any portion has been, it is less than the hundredth
part of one per cent, on the value of the supplies sent the army
through the Commission. But if fifty dollars’ worth out of every
�^6
hundred were proven to be intercepted by official corruption,
it would not excuse our abandoning the work. It should
rather inspire us to provide more actively for this additional
source of depri vation and danger. What should we think of a
farmer who declined to make provision for his stock because he
suspected his servants of stealing part of their feed?
There are, undoubtedly, intelligent people who take a different
vieXv of the case, unconsciously influenced, perhaps, by that
readiness to believe anything to the disadvantage of anybody
holding public office which seems one of our national weak
nesses. Some of them object on this ground to any organization
that works in concert with surgeons or hospital stewards, and
prefer the agency of volunteers who make unlawful inroads into
camps and hospitals, and help the individual soldier at the ex
pense of the system which must always be his main dependence.
The inevitable mischief this practice mnst produce has been
already pointed out. If one or two surgeons out of thousands
have appropriated a few hundred dollars’ worth of army stores
out of millions, the loss is insignificant when compared with the
slightest risk of impairing the morale and discipline of the army,
on which, Under God, we depend for our national existence.
The service directly rendered to the Army by the Supply De
partment, through the Commission and its branches, has been
inestimable. A full statement of its results would require pages
of detail, setting forth the operations of Relief Agents and their
Assistants after every battle, in every general hospital, and in
the camps and quarters of every Corps. Steamboats chartered
by the Cincinnati Branch reached Fort Donelson laden with
medicines and supplies of every kind in time to supplement the
deficient stores of the Medical Staff, and save hundreds of men.
At Antietam there were literally no Government Medical stores.
The surgeons had used up their stock during General Pope’s
Campaign, in Virginia. Supplies sent them from Washington
�27
had been captured at Manassas. The Quartermaster’s Depart
ment, taxed to its utmost to forward ordinance and Commissary
stores, ammunition and food, had been obliged to leave all medi
cal supplies behind, miles away from the field. But the officers
of the Commission, at Washington, advised by authority of this
unfortunate deficiency, and of the impending battle, sent off by
/ independent routes, and in good season, wagon trains laden
with medical and surgical appliances, which reached the field
before the battle was over, and for forty-eight hours after that
hardly-won victory thousands of wounded men got all their
opiates, stimulants, chloroform, medicines, appropriate diet, and
hospital clothing and bedding, mainly from Agents of the Sanitary
Commission. So at Getty sburgh, the headquarters and supply
depots of the Commission were established and at work while
the battle was hottest. At Vicksburgh, Murfreesboro, Chancellorsville, Chattanooga, Chicamauga, Fredericksburg, its relief
agents dispensed many thousand dollars’ worth of life-saving
supplies. During our Peninsular Campaign, it did the Army
most signal service. The history of its work on the Peninsula
—at White House, Savage’s Station, and Harrison’s Landing—
is yet to be written. Its Relief Depots and Hospital Transport
Service did more to relieve misery and save life than any other
voluntary organization has ever done within the same period.
After the second battle of Bull’s Run the wagon trains of the
Commission moving from Washington, met our retreating forces
at Centreville, exhausted by hard fighting, and wholly without
• restoratives or medicines. Their medical supplies had fallen
into Rebel hands. At this point, as at many others, the Com
mission’s proper work of supplementing accidental deficiencies
in the Army system saved hundreds from perishing by pros
tration and enabled them to return to their ranks and their duty.
*
* Within ten days after Chattanooga, four thousand packages of Sanitary stores
had gone to the field from Nashville, and two thousand more were on the way
I
�28
This Department of the Commission’s work has cost, not
money alone, but health and life. Many of its Agents have
already died in the service, or have been obliged to leave it
broken down by overwork and exposure or poisoned by malaria.
Another name has just been added to its roll of martyrs to our
national cause—that of Rev. James Richardson, a gentleman of
education and high social position, who died at his post Novem
ber 10th, 1863, of disease contracted in the service of the Com
mission, Two of its Agents were captured near Gettysburg]},
while carrying supplies to the front. They have undergone
months of starvation and ill-treatment at Richmond, from the
effects of which it is probable they will never fully recover.
In our General Hospitals the Relief Department of the Com
mission is now a recognized institution, on which surgeons rely
for certain extra-governmental supplies, as fully as they depend
on Government for ordinary rations. Accidental failure of
Government supplies sometimes obliges them to rely on it for
everything. This work of the Commission is not confined to
Hospitals at or near the front. During the summer of 1862, for
example, a medical officer of the Commission learning that a
transport from the Peninsula had just landed several hundred
invalids on one of the Islands of an Atlantic harbor, thought
proper to make a personal inspection of their condition. He
found them mostly bad cases of malarious typhoid fever, requir
ing vigilant nursing and stimulation from hour to hour, but with
out proper food or stimulants, or any attendance, save that of
one or two enlisted men detailed as nurses. The Post Surgeon
had gone to bed in a condition that forbade his doing more for
down the Mississippi. Up to 17th November last, 5,000 packages and boxes had
been forwarded for the relief of the wounded men at Chickamauga. The means of
classifying these supplies are not yet at hand. But a detailed statement is appended
of the supplies issued to the army of the Potomac after Gettysbubgh. (See Ap
pendix A.)
sm;
�his patients than to utter a cordial but semi-articulate consent
that the Sanitary Commission should take care of them. The
representative of the Commission forthwith sent a boat to the
city, which returned laden with beef, milk, and brandy bought
at the Hotels, for it was late and all the shops were closed. He
*
extemporized a kitchen, and spent the whole night administering
beef tea and milk punch to these neglected men, most of whom
would have been dead or past recovery before morning but for
his intervention. Many of them were saved, and an unworthy
employe of the Medical Department was summarily dismissed
.within forty-eight hours, upon report of the facts.
This is an extreme case. Instances of such misconduct are
most rare, for since the re-organization of the Medical Bureau,
our army surgeons have almost universally labored with a degree
of fidelity, energy, and self-devotion beyond all praise. But the
Commission has relieved many Hospitals suffering like destitu
tion, for which their officers were not to blame. As already
stated, the Medical Bureau has no independent transportation.
Military necessity sometimes requires that guns, ammunition and
provisions be forwarded with all possible despatch to the entire
exclusion of everything else. Supplies actually issued and con
signed to surgeons and urgently needed by them may thus often
be unavoidably detained on the road for days or weeks.
The machinery of the War Department is necessarily rigid
and wooden. A flexible organization like the Sanitary Com
mission, governed by principle rather than by
r
*ule,
and, above
all, able to exercise discretionary powers necessarily forbidden to
the officials of Government, can obviously render great service
in filling the gaps that must occur in its working, especially
on a field so vast as that of the present War.
* (And paid for at Hotel prices—an exceptional incident in the experience of the
Commission.)
�30
The value of this Relief system is well understood by the
whole Army.
*
A circular letter was lately addressed to a
large number of medical officers in charge of general hos
pitals inquiring through what Agency, National, local or
individual, supplies sent their patients did most good. The
answer was almost unanimous,—“ Through the Sanitary Com
mission, because it ministers impartially to all National soldiers,
East and West, and because it understands the paramount im
portance of subordination to Military system in all efforts for
Army relief.”-]*
z ffr <!.•’
* Headquarters Department
of
Tennessee,
Special Order, No. 86.
1. The Quartermaster’s Department will provide and furnish a suitable steam
boat, to be called the “ United States Sanitary Store Boat,” and put the same in
charge of the U. S. Sanitary Commission, to be used by it exclusively for the
conveyance of goods calculated to prevent disease, and supplemental to the Gov
ernment supply of stores for the relief of the sick and wounded.
2. No person will be allowed to travel on said boat except sick officers of the ■
army and navy, (and they only on permits from their proper commanding offi
cers,) discharged soldiers and employees of said Sanitary Commission, and no
goods whatever for trading or commercial purposes will be carried on said boat,)
and no goodswill be taken for individnals or with any conditions which will prevent them being delivered to those most needing them in the army or navy.
3. The accounts of all packages to be shipped on said U. S. Sanitary Store
Boat will be inspected before shipment, unless, an invoice of their contents hasbeen received, the correctness of which is assured by the signature of some per
son of known loyalty and integrity. • A statement, showing what goods have been
placed on board at each trip will be asent.i to the Medical Director of the Depart-’
ment at these Headquarters.
4. A weekly statement will be made by the Sanitary Commission to the Depart
ment of the Medical Director, showing what Sanitary supplies have been issued
by said Commission, and to whom Issued.^/
5. All orders authorizing the free transportation of Sanitary Stores from Cairo :
south on boats other than the one herein provided for are hereby rescinded.
By order Major General U. S.-Grant.
John A. Rawlings, Asst. Adt. General.
| This circular and all the letters in reply to it were published by the Women’s
Central Association of New York in a pamphlet entitled “ How can we best help
our Camps and Hospitals ?” New York: 1863.
�34
DEPARTMENT OF. SPECIAL RELIEF.
The necessity of this work became apparent as soon as our
volunteer forces began to assemble. It was first undertaken, at
Washington, in August, 1861, and its results there soon led to
the establishment of agencies for. the same purpose at other
points. It is now in operation throughout the country.
The General Relief System, of which some account has Just
been given, assists the soldier when in camp or in hospital, by
strengthening and supplementing the military system with which
he is then in close connexion, and on which it is his right and
his duty mainly to depend. The Department of Special Relief
deals mainly with the waifs and estrays of the Army, and
relieves the individual soldier when temporarily out of connexion
with the Military system. It gives him shelter, food, medical
treatment and transportation when it. is impossible for him
tq obtain rthem. from, Government. At points; dike Washington, or. Nashville, for, . example, there, may.be daily , found
scores or hundreds. of men, separated from, their regiments
and anxious to rejoin them, but unable to obtain transportation,
and without legal title meanwhile to quarters or rations, or any;
kind of recognition or aid from any Government officer within
reach... Some are returning after a furlough, but find that their
regiment has moved. Their little stock of money has. given .;
out, and they must beg through the streets, for aught that any
official. , has the power to.. do for them. Others.. are * sick,
but no. Hospital can admit them without a breach of regula
tions. Others are waiting to get their back pay, but there is
some technical defect in their papers for which they are not re
sponsible, and they must wait a week for a letter to, reach their
regiment and be answered, before they can draw a dollar from
the Paymaster, and subsist as they can meanwhile. ,
These seem at first to be serious abuses, but they are, in faet,
merely inevitable incidents of the rigorous system of. detail :
�82
that is essential to every army, and especially to armies so
large as ours. It is only through technical regulations, un
sparingly enforced, that the most mischievous irregularities can
be prevented, and the army as a whole kept in working condition.
But any such system, however necessary on the whole, must
produce cases of hardship, and in great armies such cases must
be numerous. When the subject matter of these regulations is
the provision of food, shelter, clothing and hospital treatment,
whatever hardship their inflexibility produces, must cost health,
efficiency and life. The Army has thus but the choice of
two evils. It must suffer as a whole, because regulations are
not rigidly enforced, or individuals must suffer because they are.
There can of course be no question which of these two evils is
the greater. However great may be the amount of suffering
thus caused, only a blind and reckless philanthropy would seek
to remedy it at the expense of discipline. A large portion
of the suffering in question arises, in fact, not so much from the
rigor of the system as from the want of accuracy on the part
of those who administer it, ancf seems due to a deficiency rather
than an excess of “ red tape.”
For this inevitable evil, the Commission seeks to provide
through its Special Relief Department. To the extent of its
means it keeps everywhere within the soldier’s reach establish
ments to supply him with food, shelter and medical care, when
he can get them nowhere else, and to supplement the inflexible
machinery of the Commissary Department, the Quartermaster’s
Department, the Paymaster’s Office, and the Medical Bureau.
This Department does much work also that can hardly be dis
tinguished from that of General Relief, except in this, that while
the latter provides for men in camp, in hospital, or on the march,
the former gives them especial attention and care while passing
from the condition of recruits to that of National soldiers, and
while still unfamiliar with the system through which they must
obtain subsistence, quarters and medical treatment.
�33
For example, a newly-raised regiment reaches Louisville or
Washingtoi^late at night, after a weary, depressing day, spent
without food in cattle cars without seats. The men are exhaust
ed, and a dozen or twenty of them are ill. Sick and well, they
are deposited at the railroad terminus. The Regimental Sur
geon’s medical stores are buried in the baggage cars, and cannot
be got out till morning. He is in a strange place, and does not
know where to go to get his patients into hospital. The Com
pany officers are equally inexperienced. It may take them half
the next day to ascertain how to get rations and quarters for
their men. Meanwhile, the men must stand in the street and
get on as best they may, without food, shelter, or medical at
tendance, the healthy sickening and the sick growing worse from
hour to hour.
This is a very moderate statement of what has occurred over
and over again. Many have died of fatigue and exposure under
these circumstances in the street or on the floor of a depot, be
fore their connection with the Government machinery could be
so established as to become available for their relief. A little
suitable food or stimulus, and a few hours rest, would probably
have saved most of them. But their officers cannot, under the
circumstances, be severely censured for the loss.
The Commission provides for cases of this class. Its agents
are kept informed by telegraph of the movements of newly-raised
regiments, and are prepared to receive them, with coffee and
soup for the well men, and with ambulances for the sick, who
are at once conveyed to a “ Home” of the Commission, where
they receive food, shelter, nursing, and medical care, till they
are able to join their regiment, or are duly transferred to Gen
eral Hospital. Many thousand men “ slightly ailing” have been
saved from illness that would have made them unserviceable for
weeks or months, and perhaps forever, by the few days or hours
of repose, comfort and medical care thus afforded them.
3
�84
The Homes of the Commission provide in like manner for the
large class already mentioned of men separated fr<gm their regi
ments, unable to get transportation, and without money or
friends, and to whom no officer within their reach can supply
quarters or rations without personal liability and violation of
Army rules. Every such case is carefully scrutinized. If it be
genuine, the man receives subsistence and quarters at the
“ Home” until the position of his regiment is ascertained, and
he is furnished transportation to rejoin it.
A regiment carrying its sick with it in ambulances is often
detailed in passing through a city. As the length of this deten
tion is uncertain, and the regiment may have to move at a mo
ment’s notice, these sick men cannot well be transferred to a
General Hospital. Their admission and their discharge would
each require too much time. But if a “ Home” of the Com
mission be within reach it provides for them during their deten
tion.
The work of the Special Relief Department is too various for
complete classification. Every day brings out some new case for
its intervention, differing from all that have preceded it. But its
chief objects are as follows :
*
9
First.—To supply the sick of newly arrived regiments such
medicines, food, and care as their officers are, under the circum
stances, unable to give them. The men thus aided are chiefly
those not sick enough to have a claim on a general hospital, but
who nevertheless need immediate care to prevent serious illness.
Second.—To furnish suitable food, lodging, care, and assist. ance to men who are honorably discharged as unfit for further
service, but who are often obliged to wait for several days be
* See printed reports of Mr. F. N. Knapp, Superintendent of Special Relief.
�35
fore they obtain their papers and pay, or to sell their claims to
speculators, at a sacrifice.
Third.—To communicate with distant regiments in behalf of
men whose certificates of disability or descriptive lists on which
to draw their pay prove to be defective—the invalid soldiers
meantime being cared for, and not exposed to the fatigue and
risk of going in person to their regiments to have their papers
corrected.
Fourth.—To act as the unpaid agent or attorney of soldiers
who are too feeble or too utterly disabled to present their own
claim at the Paymaster’s office.
Fifth.—To look into the condition of discharged and fur
loughed men who seem without means to pay the expense of
going to their homes, and to furnish the necessary means where
the man is found to be true and the need real.
Sixth.—To secure to soldiers going home on sick leave rail
road tickets at reduced rates, and through an agent at thi# rail
road station to see that they are not robbed or imposed upon.
Seventh.—To see that all men who are discharged and paid
off do at once leave the city at which they receive their dis
charge, for their homes, or in cases where they have been induced
by evil companions to remain behind, to endeavor to rescue
them, and see them started homeward with through tickets.
Eighth.—To make men going home discharged, or on sick
leave, reasonably clean and comfortable before their departure.
Ninth.—To be prepared to meet, at once, with food or other
aid, such immediate necessities as arise when sick men arrive in
large numbers from battle fields or distant hospitals.
�36
Tenth.—To keep a watchful eye upon all soldiers who are out
of hospitals, yet not in service; and give information to the
proper authorities of such soldiers as seem endeavoring to avoid
duty or to desert from the ranks.
In all these arrangements the Commission and its branches
receive practical support and aid from the Quartermaster’s
Department, which makes its beneficial work tenfold more ef
fective.
It must be understood, that the “ Homes ” are administered
in no spirit of indiscriminate philanthrophy. Malingerers and de
serters who have found refuge within them under false pretences,
are promptly turned over to military authority, and no soldier is
permitted to enjoy their privileges for a single day after he is
pronounced fit for duty.
These Relief Stations are established at most of our Military
Centres. The “ Home” at Washington is a large three-story brick
building on North Capitol street, with temporary wooden build
ings around it, and with auxiliary “ lodges ” established near
the Paymaster’s office, and other centres around which soldiers
are obliged to congregate. Each has its provision of beds, and
of food, its housekeeper, nurses, and attending Physician, and its
staff of experts in Army relief. Before they were established
men actually died of weariness and exhaustion while waiting
their turn in the dense crowd and blazing sunshine around the
Paymaster’s Office. Soldiers physically unequal to this ordeal
are now provided with shelter and rations till they have secured
their pay.
The following extract from Mr. Knapp’s last report on the
“ Home” at Washington indicates the nature and value of the
Commission’s Special Relief work at that point:
“ ‘ The Home,’ 374 North Capitol street.—Increased accommoi dations for securing room and comfort have been obtained; and
�37
“ now, instead of 140 beds, we have at the Home 320, besides a
“ large baggage-room, a convenient wash-room, a bath-house, &c.
“ Two of the additional buildings, one 16 feet by 60, the other 28
“ feet by 90, were put up by the Quartermaster’s Department.
“ The third building 30 feet by 50 (with an L 20 by 35) for a
“ ‘ Hospital,’ (this was at the expense of the Commission,) at a cost
“ of about $800. The necessity for this building, devoted exclu“ sively to Hospital purposes, is found in the fact, that although
u the men who came under the care of the Commission are
“ mostly on their way to their homes, and might therefore be
“ supposed to be not so very feeble as to need specially “ Hos“ pital ” treatment, yet, as a matter of fact many of them are
“ weakened to such a degree by disease, that by the time they
“ reach Washington, or the railway station from the front, or
“ from the various hospitals, their strength is nearly exhausted,
“ and they are only restored, if at all, by such care as hospital
“ treatment affords; and frequently they are too far gone to
“ make that available, as is indicated by the record which shows
“ that frotn February 23d to October 1st, there were received at
“ the Home 665 men, very sick, who were placed in the new
“ Hospital, of which number thirty-eight died there. This was
“ from February 23d, when this new building was opened, but
“ dating back to December 15th, there has been under the
“ charge of the Commission, including those just named, so®ie
“ 900 men who were very sick and feeble, of which number a
“ total of sixty-one (61) have died at the Home. These were
“ nearly all men having their discharge papers with them, and «
“ they had consequently given up their claim upon the General
“ or Regimental Hospitals, and had taken the first stage of their
“ journey towards their homes. If they had not found the care
“ which the Commission thus offered to them, these same men
“ must have died in the cars along the way, or at some stopping
“ point on their journey. Of the remaining 840 of these very
�38
“ feeble men we have reason to believe that many, except for the
“ care and rest secured to them by the provision of the Commis“ sion, could not have lived through their journeys.
#******
_?
“ At this office and lodge No. 4, from January 1st to October
“ 1st, 1863, the number of discharged soldiers whose accounts
“ against the Government have been settled through our assist“ ance, men who were too feeble to attend to settling their own
“ accounts, or who were unable to obtain their pay because of
“ some charge against them on the pay-rolls, or some errors in
“ their papers, amount to 2,130.”
x
“ Information and directions have been given relative to set“ tling pay accounts, collecting arrears of pay, extra duty pay,
“ and commutation money to about 9,000 men.
“ The aggregate value of the 2130 cases amounted to
“ $130,159 01. This amount was collected and paid to the
“ soldiers through this office.
“ But for the gratuitous aid thus afforded, these soldiers dis“ charged from the service, disabled by wounds, or worn down
“ by long marches and exposure in the field, or enfeebled by
“ disease, anxious to get home, would have applied to ‘ Claim
“ Agents’ for aid in obtaining speedily their dues from Gov“ ernment, submitting willingly to pay a commission ranging
“ from 10 to 40 per cent. These Agents, with some rare and
“ admirable exceptions, in four cases out of every five, impede
“ the settlement of accounts instead of facilitating them.
“ Taking 10 per cent, as an average, which is the lowest com“ mission usually charged by Claim Agents, the amount saved
“ to the soldiers in adjusting the 2130 cases of which a record
“ has been kept, is shewn to be $13,015 90. Add to this 10 per
“ cent, of the probable aggregate value of the 9000 cases in
“ which information and directions have been given, (for in most
“ of these cases the soldiers would otherwise have gone to Claim
�39
“ Agents) and the amount saved to the soldiers through tho
“ Commission by this office, is shown to be at least $70,000
“ during nine months ending September 30th.”
“ The number of letters written in adjusting the above cases
“ of sufficient importance to make a copy necessary, 2,224.
“ Many of the cases have been very difficult to adjust, requir“ ing several weeks to complete them.
“ The ‘Home’ or ‘Lodge for Special Relief’ at Alexandria
“ is almost equally important with those at Washington. Alexan“ dria is the gateway toward home for the sick and wounded of
“ the Potomac Army. During the first week after this Agency
“ was established, it provided meals for 1761 sick or wounded
“ men who could have got them nowhere else.
“ In January, 1863, a ‘ Nurse’s Home’ was opened at Washing“ ton. It has proved a source of immense relief to nurses arriving
“ in the city, and to those worn down by service at the hospitals,
“ and needing a few days of quiet and rest, and also to the wives,
“ mothers and daughters of soldiers who have come on seeking
“ their husbands, sons or fathers in hospital. During the past two
“ months many of this latter class have been cared for who, utterly
“ ignorant of the cost of their journey, and of obtaining board
“ and lodging, even for a day or two, in the city, were utterly
“ destitute and helpless. Hundreds of weary and almost broken
“ hearted women have been received as at a home. Many re“ fugees also—mothers and little children—have been received
“ here and warmed and clothed. This has proved in its working
“ one of the kindest charities of the Commission.”
Since the “ Nurses’ Home ” was opened in January, the total
number of nights’ lodging given has been........................... 1583
Meals furnished........................................................................ 3040
Number of women sheltered and admitted......................... 1190
Total cost to Commission, about.......................................... $2,300
#
�40
The Homes of the Special Belief Department at Washington,
Louisville, Alexandria, Annapolis, and New Orleans, are sup
ported by the Central Treasury of the Commission; at other
points mainly by its Branches.
Their work up to October 1st, 1863, has been as follows :—
“ THE HOME,” WASHINGTON, D. C.
Number of individuals received............ ............................ 7,287
“
“ nights lodging furnished.................................... 26,533
“
“ meals given............... .......................................... 65,621
LODGES NOS. 2, 3, 4 AND 5, WASHINGTON, D. 0.
Number ofnights lodgings furnished................................. 23,590
“
“ meals given....................................
184,995
“home”
IN CLEVELAND, OHIO.
Number of nights lodgings furnished............................... 2,569
“
“ meals given........................................................ 12,227
LODGE AT MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE.
Number of nights lodgings furnished................................ 2,850
“
“ meals given........................................................ 14,780
LODGE AT NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE.
Number of nights lodgings furnished..............
4,821
“
“ meals given............................................................11,909
“HOME” AT LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY.
Number of nights lodgings furnished................................ 17,785
“
“ meals given at the Home.................................. 52,080
“
“
“
“ at Station House......................... 49,933
�41
CC
*
___55
■ HOME ” AT CAIRO, ILLINOIS.
Number of nights lodgings furnished.........................
79,550
“
“ meals given........................................................ 170,150
“home”
AT •CINCINNATI, OHIO.
Number of nights lodgings furnished................................ 40,017
“
“ meals given (about).............. 1.......................... 10,000
LODGE AT ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA.
Number of nights lodgings furnished...............................
“
“ meals given................................... 1................
604
5,980
“ HOME ” AT BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS.
Number of nights lodgings furnished........ ;......................
“
“ meals given...........................
1,407
4,129
“ HOME ” FOR NURSES AND FOR SOLDIERS WIVES AND MOTHERS AT
WASHINGTON, D. C.
Number of nights lodgings furnished................................
“
“ meals given................
1,583
3,640
4
“ HOME ” FOR NURSES AT ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND.
Number of nights lodgings furnished.................................
“
“ meals given........................................................
569
2,847
“HOME” AT CHICAGO.
Number of nights lodgings furnished................................ 3,109
“
“ meals given........................................................ 11,325
The aggregate of nights’ lodgings furnished by the
Special Relief Department up to the 1st October
last, is therefore.............................................................. 206,570
And of meals provided.........................................
602,656
�42
The total cost of the Special Relief Department at Wash
ington, Annapolis and Alexandria, from August, 1861, to 1st
October, 1863, has been $24,582 00.
*
Among the modes in which thi^ Department does its work of
relief are several that have not been mentioned.
For example, it corresponds on behalf of soldiers with their
friends. In special cases it sends Agents with officers and sol
diers suffering under severe disease to take care of them on their
journey home.f It attends to the claims of soldiers whose pay
is unjustly withheld through mistake or otherwise. It looks
into cases of punishment or disgrace alleged to be unjust, and
if they be found so on investigation, lays the evidence before the
proper military authorities. £ Such errors must occur in the
working of a military system so extensive as ours, and the Com
mission has thus saved many good and faithful soldiers from
undeserved punishment and disgrace. It employs detectives to
ferret out and bring to justice sharpers and gamblers who live
by preying on the soldiers. It looks out for men who set off for
hospital on foot, but break down by the way, and supplies them
with conveyances.
* The “Home” recently established at New Orleans has lodged and fed 2,162
men from October 16th to 22d November, 1863. From November 22d to 27th, its
daily average of cases relieved was more than 250.
f The expense of this service has been defrayed from a special fund raised for
the purpose. Though a most humane and life saving office, it seems to involve too
large an outlay on individual cases, to be paid for out of the general Treasury
of the Commission.
t Between Oct. 1 and Dec. 1, 1863, thirty-four applications were made to the
Special Relief Agency at Washington alone, by men claiming to have been unjust
ly disgraced and deprived of their arrears of pay as “deserters” or “absent with
out leave.” The investigation of some of these claims required twenty letters to
Hospital Directors and Regimental officers, for it was necessary to ascertain and
to prove where the applicant had been during every day of the period of his
alleged absence from duty. Twenty-eight of these thirty-four claims were proved
to be valid, and were recognized as valid by the military authorities. The men
had not known how to state them, or how to obtain the necessary evidence.
�43
In short, there is hardly a service within the whole range of
charity that has not been rendered our soldiers by this agency.
And they must surely endure longer and fight better for
knowing that they are thus watched over and aided by the Peo
ple whose cause they maintain.
HOSPITAL DIRECTORY.
This branch of the Special Relief Department is of compara
tively recent date. Its offices are at Washington, Philadelphia,
Louisville and New York. Its necessity arises from the prac
tical difficulty of obtaining information about men in hospital
from official sources. It keeps a record of the name, regiment
and company of every man admitted into General Hospital, and
of the nature of his disease or injury, and also of every man
dying or discharged, and if discharged, whether it was to re
join his regiment, or as permanently disabled. These records are
corrected daily. Friends and relatives can thus readily ascertain
by letter whether any given man is in general hospital, and if
so, all particulars about him.
The names entered on the Hospital Directory books from
June 9th to Oct. 1st, 1863, were—
At
“
“
“
the
“
“
“
Washington office..................................................... 64,635
New York
“ ...................................................... 18,771
Philadelphia “ .......................... 12,213
Louisville
“ from May 9th............................ 96,433
Total...................................................... 1............... 192,052
Add number of names on record June 9th........................215,221
Total................................................................................. 407,273
Recorded as follows:
Washington office to Oct.
New York
“ “ “
Philadelphia “ “ “
Louisville
“ “ “
1st, 1863.................................... 169,007
“
“
27,320
“
“
24,513
“
“
186,433
______
Total....................................................................^....407,273
�44
The number of inquiries and of answers, from the organiza
tion of the Directory to Oct. 1,1863, have been as follows. The
surplus of inquiries over answersis the number of cases in which
the subject of inquiry had not been in General Hospital since
the Directory System went into operation.
Washington office, inquiries . ... 6,712
cc
cc
656
New York
“
cc
CC
547
Philadelphia “
cc
cc
5,852
Louisville
“
Inquiries...........
Answers.............. 4,524
“ “
474
“ “
348
“ “
4,016
13,767 Answers...............9,362
It may at first seem that this undertaking, however humane,
has no connection with the Sanitary interests of the Army, and
is therefore no legitimate work for the Sanitary Commission.
But it practically multiplies to a great extent the facilities for
correspondence and communication between men in hospital and
their friends at home, and such communications are often worth
more than any medicine to the sick and convalescent. They
promote health, bodily and mental, keep up the sick man’s
morale, and expedite his recovery and his return to duty.
OTHER WORK OF THE COMMISSION.
The Commission does much work beside that comes strictly
under none of the preceding heads. During and after a battle,
its medical officers act as volunteer aids to those of the
Army, while its Relief Agents add to their proper office of
dispensing medicines and supplies the functions of nurses, hospi
tal stewards, and ambulance drivers. Honorable instances are
recorded of the courage and devotion with which they have
brought off wounded men under fire.
*
The Commission retains
* We find the following in the Port Royal Free South of the 25th instant:
“The officers of the United States Sanitary Commission have won for them- ,
selves a splendid reputation in this department. They have by their discretion and
�45
no one in its service who shrinks from any work, hazardous,
menial, or mechanical, that comes in the course of his duty.
It has organized a system by which extra supplies are fur
nished our general hospitals at prime cost, thus effecting a very
large daily saving to their “ hospital funds.’^ Up to 1st Novem
ber last it had thus expended more than $10,000 on hospitals
around Washington, and in South Carolina.
It endeavors to keep the people, and especially the loyal wo
men of the North, informed of the wants of the Army, and
stimulates the production and forwarding of Army supplies.
It calls the attention of Government to the defects and abuses
that appear from time to time in the various branches of the
service and directly or indirectly affect the health of the Army,
and recommends to Government such improvements in the
Medical and Sanitary administration of the Army as seem enti
tled to its attention.
It relieves our men in rebel prisons wherever it is permitted
to do so, and is now sending to Richmond (at a cost of nearly a
thousand dollars a day) large consignments of food and other
supplies, appropriate for men broken down by confinement and
*
starvation.
zeal saved many valuable lives. Under the guns of Wagner, in the hottest of the
fire, their trained corps picked up and carried off the wounded almost as they fell.
As many of our men were struck while ascending the parapet and then rolled into
the moat, which at high tide contains six feet of water, they must inevitably have
perished had they been suffered to remain. But the men who were detailed for
the service with Dr. Marsh went about the work with intrepidity and coolness
worthy of all praise. The skill and experience of the members of the Commission
has, since the battle, been unremittingly employed to render comfortable the sick
and wounded.—2V. Y. Evening Post, July 30, 1863.
* It has established on every flag-of-truce boat from Fortress Monroe for the re
ception of exchanged prisoners a depot of such medicines and restoratives as are
most suitable for men in the distressing condition in which they are generally found
when discharged from confinement at Richmond. From Nov. 17 to Dec. 3 it has
sent $28,000 worth of supplies beside to Richmond. There is every reason to
believe that these supplies are not intercepted or misappropriated, and that the
Rebel authorities do in good faith protect them from attack, and convey them to
their destination. [Dec. 10, 1863.]
�46
Above all, it loses no opportunity of advocating every measure
calculated to increase the efficiency of the Military system itself
in all its relations with the sanitary interests of the Army; and
it has in this way probably done the Army as much substantial
service as by all its other agencies together. More than two
years of experience and .observation have shown it that the main
dependence of the soldier, sick or well, must be on the Military
system, and not on outside help. The reformation of the Medi
cal Bureau, and the appointment of an honest, energetic, ac
complished and fearless officer as Surgeon-General, is mainly
*
due to the influence the' Commission brought to bear on Gov
ernment. It has thus done more for the health of the Army
than could have been done for it in any other way whatever.
The Commission hopes to effect further reforms, still sorely
needed, and thus by still farther increasing the efficiency of the
Medical Bureau, to make its own existence less and less a neces
sity to the Army.
%
OBJECTIONS TO THE COMMISSION.
The Commission has from the first enjoyed a degree of public
favor and confidence greater than it had any right to expect.
Certain objections, however, are made to its system and methods
which require a brief notice, though they have for the most part
been already anticipated.
One is that the Commission employs paid agents, and that its
organization is expensive. It has already been shown that paid
and permanent Agents are in the long run cheaper than unpaid
volunteers, because the superiority of skilled labor over un
skilled, is much more than equivalent to the amount thus paid
to secure it.
The more general charge that the Commission’s system is a
* Dr. Wm. A. Hammond.
�47
costly one, is believed to be wholly unfounded. Its salaries are
on a most moderate scale.
*
Thanks to the co-operation of Go
vernment and the liberality of Railroad, Telegraph and Express
Companies, and other private agencies, its expenses for transpor
tation and telegraphing are not one-tenth of what they would
otherwise be. A reference to the statistics given above of'the
cost of its special relief system at Washington, Alexandria and
Annapolis, show how much work it has done at comparatively
trifling expense. The value of the supplies it has actually
issued to the Army from its numerous depots, East and West,
can only be estimated, and these estimates vary largely, the
lowest estimate being about four millions of dollars, and the
highest exceeding seven.
These supplies have been carried all over the country, from
Maine to Texas, and from Washington to Vicksburg, in charge
of special agents, and deposited in Relief Stations where store
keepers are necessarily engaged to protect them, and Relief
Agents to distribute them; yet this great mass of bulky stores
has been moved, stored at the depots, moved to the front, stored
again in temporary depots, and then distributed, at a total
expense to the Central Treasury of less than one and seven
eighths per cent, on their lowest valuation.
Another objection to the Commission is generally expressed
somewhat as follows:—
“ It is a very benevolent organization, no doubt, and relieves
* It may be proper here distinctly to state, that no member of the Commission
receives, or ever has received a dollar from its treasury, or from any other quarter,
in the shape of salary, or compensation for his services as Commissioner. Four of
its members hold office, viz.: its President, Vice-President, and Treasurer, and its
Associate Secretary at Louisville. Of these, the first three have been able to do
their official work without absolutely sacrificing all their other duties, and they
have done it without dreaming of “ pay” from any quarter. The Associate Secre
tary, who has removed his home from Cleveland to Louisville, abandoned his pro
fession, and devoted his whole time and energies to his official work, receives a
moderate salary.
�48
“ a great deal of suffering. But it does harm in the long run,
“ because officers are tempted to lean upon it and neglect their
‘‘ official duty of providing for their men. Without the Com“ mission there might have been more suffering at first; but
“ this evil would have cured itself by this time. Officers would
“ have been obliged to become more active and vigilant, and
“ the Army would now be in perfect condition and need no help
“ from without.”
The principle on which this criticism rests underlies all the
policy of the Commission. It has already been shown that its
system is so framed and guarded, that no Army officer can take
advantage of it to escape duty or to cover up inefficiency. But
in the application of this principle by those who use it as an ob
jection to the Commission, there is a peculiar fallacy which it is
worth while to point out.
So far from endangering the military system by relief from
without, the Commission has from the first been the chief pro
tection of the Army against this very danger, and the only organi
zation, official or private, that has openly aided and encouraged
our Military authorities in their endeavor to avert it. Though
wholly dependent on popular sympathy for support, it has uni
formly maintained this position, though well aware that it is
peculiarly distasteful to many whose patriotism and human
ity are stronger than their judgment.
The Commission did not create the unprecedented popular
effort to furnish supplies for the sick and wounded, which will
distinguish the history of this War from that of all others,
That movement began before the Commission was in existence,
when the first Regiment of National Volunteers was mustered
into the National service. It was equally spontaneous and irre
sistible. Neither the Commission nor Government could’have
checked it had they felt disposed to try. It still continues, and
it will continue so long as a single regiment remains in the field.
�49
The Commission when first appointed found the stream in full
flow, but guided by zeal rather than discretion. One regiment
out of every two, East and West, was waited on and followed up
by Agents and Relief Committees from its own town or county,
begging surgeons and quartermasters to take a few packages of
hospital stores off their hands, and surreptitiously administering
delicacies and medicaments wherever they could secure a re
cipient. Other regiments were suffering for want of necessary
subsistence, because recruited in some neighborhood less wealthy
or less liberal. Officers seemed as much disturbed by the de
moralizing interference of friends in the rear as by the demon
strations of the enemy in their front.
The Commission recognized the depth of the National in>
pulses that were at work, the immense mischief they might do
if allowed to run wild, and the good they might do if organized
and regulated, and it undertook the work of so guiding
these efforts as to make them more effective and less
dangerous to discipline. It found the Army inundated by a
flood of public bounty, wasting itself where it was not wanted,
and threatening to undermine the foundations of official respon
sibility. Its endeavor has been and is to direct this stream into
measured channels, carrying it to the points at which it will do
most good, and applying its power to strengthen the working of
the military system.
It has thus to a great extent saved the Army from the mischief
this torrent of outside relief might have done it. If it has not
fully done so, it is because so many agencies and societies for
Army relief continue to work independently of the Commission
and by methods 'which it does not approve and cannot control.
The objection that “ Government ought to do the work the
Commission is doing” has no longer the foundation it had before
the Reform of the Medical Bureau. Government might undoubtedly still farther invigorate that Bureau and thus still
4
�50
farther diminish the necessity for the Commission. Let 11s hope
that it soon will. But to refuse aid to the Army on this ground
would be mere inhumanity. No Government, moreover, has
yet been able through its own proper machinery to do for its
soldiers what the Government and the Commission together do
for ours, and the objection above quoted, though undeniable as
an abstract proposition concerning the functions of an ideal
Government, is not applicable to our Government, or to any
other that exists, or has eVer existed. The provision Govern
ment makes for the physical wants of the soldier in sickness and
in health is profuse when compared with that made by France
or England, or by any other power. But it cannot permanently
maintain a medical and surgical staff large enough to provide
with promptness (or rather without such delay as would seem
shocking and criminal if it occurred in connection with some
casualty of civil life) for the casualties of battle even on the
smallest scale.
A regiment, for instance, of a thousand strong, after a day’s
fighting, leaves, say one hundred men wounded on the field, and
scattered over an area of one or two square miles. To hunt them
up and provide for them there are one surgeon and one assistant,
with a small detail of enlisted men. The next day the regiment
moves twenty miles farther, fights again, and leaves as many
more wounded men on this second battle ground. The surgeon
and his assistant cannot possibly give thorough attention to
every case in these two widely separated field hospitals. Twenty
surgeons would be hardly enough to care for both during the
first few days, as patients are cared for in private practice.
Public sympathy with our wounded men demands that each
receive the full benefit of all that vigilance and science can do
for each of them. But government cannot provide this measure
of relief. There are not in the country thoroughly educated
surgeons enough to permanently supply every regiment with
�51.
^ven five competent medical officers instead of two. But twenty
to each would he too few to give full attention and care to
all the sufferers after a great battle.
Government may be theoretically bound to supply this de
ficiency, but it is practically beyond the resources of govern
ment. The gap has been filled up during the last two years, in
some degree at least, by the creative energies of the people
exerted through the Sanitary Commission. The people thus
maintains a supplementary Medical Bureau of its own for the
purpose, among others, of sending forward civil surgeons of the
first professional rank to reinforce the army medical staff in
emergency. When a battle is in progress, or at hand, the relief
agents of the Commission on the spot telegraph to Louisville,
Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, or some other
point, and its agency there engages the best medical talent within
reach for temporary service during the next week or fortnight.
It has already been shown that our military system is, and
must be, founded on a rigorous system of regulations and official
responsibility, and that any such system must sometimes break
down by unavoidable accident or otherwise. Public opinion
makes too little allowance for this. It condemns the Medical
Bureau because its stores arrive too late at one point, and gives
it no credit for the energy and prevision that carried them in
good season to ninety-nine others.
Government must depend for its transportation on railroads
and steamboats. Its trains and transports are just as liable
as any others to accident and detention, and often much more so.
•jSuch accidents and detentions often cause suffering and death,
for which neither the Medical Bureau nor any official is justly
accountable. In every such case our camps and hospitals have
the relief agencies of the Commission to fall back upon, and
though in supplying their wants the Commission is literally
.“doing what Government ought to do,” it nevertheless does
�52
what Government cannot do at that particular time and place,
and what the people would not willingly see left undone.
The Commission was at one time accused of desiring to usurp
the functions of the Medical Bureau, and of putting itself forward
as a rival of the Medical staff, but it must be evident from what
has been already stated, that all the policy and efforts of the
Commission have tended, from the first, in a precisely opposite
direction. It has labored untiringly, and not without re
sults, to uphold the Medical Bureau, and to obtain it addi
tional powers. Just so far as these efforts have succeeded,
have they diminished the prominence and importance of the
Commission. Its members have good reason to desire that Gov
ernment should assume all that part of its work which Govern
ment can do, for their duties have proved far more onerous than
was anticipated when they were undertaken; they often require
the sacrifice of professional and private interests, and at any
time less critical than the present they would much exceed the
amount of voluntary public service that can reasonably be ex
pected of private citizens.
Other criticisms on the work of the Commission, relating
mostly to points of detail, do not require special notice. They
are generally founded on some mistake about facts. We all
know what swarms of “ authentic statements,” “ reliable reports,”
and pieces of “ direct information” are daily engendered concern
ing the army, and everybody and everything connected with
it, and how utterly untrustworthy they are apt to be. The
Commission is the permanent subject of a due proportion of
these legends, both commendatory and disparaging.
In estimating the value of the latter, it should be remem
bered that the work of the Commission necessarily makes it
enemies. Medical and other officers who know that their inca
�53
pacity or indolence has been detected and noted by a relief
agent or inspector, naturally think it a meddlesome and mischie
vous organization, and are always ready to report, and sometimes
to embellish and magnify, every case of failure in its work.
Officers of the Medical Staff who stood high on the list, and
were expecting speedy promotion and additional rank and
emoluments, when Government was prevailed on to fill the
higher offices of the Medical Bureau according to ability and
not, as before, according to seniority (or, in other words, by
selecting the best man instead of the oldest), cannot be expected
to admire the Sanitary Commission. Some of them think (very
naturally) that it has “ ruined the service,” and are not disin
clined to believe and to endorse any story that tells against it.
Many of our most thoughtful and far-sighted people, misin
formed as to its aim and policy, suppose it to seek merely the
immediate relief of the sick or wounded soldier, at any cost to
military self-reliance and discipline, and distrust it accord
ingly. Thousands of warm-hearted and energetic men and
women, diligently laboring for portions of the army through
State agencies and local societies, find the Sanitary Com mission throwing cold water on their work, because it is not con
formed to the system which the Commission holds to be the
most economical, the most National, and altogether the best.
They cannot help becoming more or less prejudiced against the
Commission, which seems thus to discourage and discredit what
they rightly feel to be the most unselfish and the most important
work of their lives, and they are thus unconsciously predisposed
to believe anything they may hear against it.
For a year past the Commission has been under no necessity
of appealing to the public for support. It has been sustained
during that period mainly by the splendid and spontaneous con
tributions it received from beyond the Rocky Mountains. These
�$4'
enabled it to breathe freely, to lay out large and liberal plans,
to work for the future as well as for the present, and to expand
its system both of prevention and of relief to dimensions com
mensurate with the wants of the whole Army.
But these great contributions are now nearly exhausted. The
Commission receives no money from Government, and has no
income from any quarter on which it can rely. The con
tinuance of voluntary public contributions is necessarily too
uncertain to justify it in forming or continuing permanent
engagements or in undertaking any work that requires con
siderable time for its execution.
*
It’s ordinary expenditure is
nearly fifty thousand dollars a month. During last July it was
more than ninety thousand. It’s operations cannot be main
tained on their present scale without a reserve fund of at least
one hundred thousand. The balance in its treasury has now
fallen much below that point, and unless it be speedily and
* Our daily papers are full of paragraphs and advertisements about subscrip
tions and undertakings in aid of the “Sanitary Commission,” which often do not, in
fact, aid the Commission at all. The proceeds of the Fairs, Lectures, and other
entertainments announced as “for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission,” are
seldom received by its treasurer. They generally go to the treasury of some one
of its branches, and are applied to local expenses, to local “ special relief,” and to
the purchase of supplies and material. They thus relieve the general treasury of
the Commission, to some extent, from the necessity of purchasing supplies, but
they contribute nothing to any other department of its work. For instance, the
great “Sanitary Commission Fair” recently got up with such unprecedented and
admirable talent and energy by the loyal-people of Chicago, has produced not less
than sixty-nine thousand dollars. But it is not expected that any portion of this
amount will be received by the central treasury of the Commission. The pro
posed “Metropolitan Fair,” in New York, will be for the benefit of the Com
mission itself, but months must elapse before its proceeds are received, and the
Commission require large sums to sustain it in operation meanwhile.
The distinction between a “ Commission ” and a “ Committee ” seems not gene
rally recognised. Committees of patriotic and humane citizens, anxious to do
something to promote the sanitary condition of the army, style themselves the
“Sanitary Commission of-------- ” and report their receipts as contributed to
“the Sanitary Commission.” People are thus led to over-estimate the receipts
and under estimate the wants of the U. S. Sanitary Commission—the only or
ganization for army relief commissioned by Government and entitled to that name.
�55
abundantly replenished, it must at once begin winding up its
affairs, closing its “• homes” and depots, dismissing its agents, and
preparing to retire from the field.’ No reduction of its work to a
smaller and less expensive scale is practicable. It must continue
to do all it now does, or cease attempting to do anything. For
should it be obliged to abandon any part of the ground it now
covers, the diminution of its efficiency would be at once per
ceived, and the public support at once farther diminished. Each
successive contraction of its work would produce corresponding
contraction of its means, and it would rapidly dwarf and dwindle,
inch by inch, till it ceased to be worth sustaining at all. It would
be unseemly that a work so noble and so new in history as that
which the people has done through the Commission should ter
minate in lingering decay, and pass through successive stages of
'weakness to insignificance and extinction. It should rather stop
short while still in full vigor, for its existence in decrepitude and
with failing energies would bring discredit on the people, and
do little to help the Army.
The Commission now asks the country to decide, and that
promptly, whether it shall or shall not continue its work. It
makes no appeal to public humanity and sympathy, for they are
already enlisted in its favor. It declines to stimulate those feel
ings as it might, most effectively, by dwelling on the pathetic
and touching incidents of its work, on the cases of heroic suffer
ing it has relieved, and the brave men who have thanked it for
saving them to do further service to the country. It addresses
itself not to the sentiment, but to the practical good sense of the
community, and asks no support except from those who are
satisfied that the country receives a full return in money value
for all the country gives to support it. It submits to every man
the question whether it has or has not saved the country ten
times its cost by what it has done to economize the life, health,
and efficiency of the army—whether the continuance of this
�56
z-
i
work will or will not tend appreciably to diminish the cost and
the duration of the war; and whether he will or will not promote
his own material interests by doing what he can to sustain it.
In considering these questions, it must be remembered that in
all campaigns three or four men die of preventible disease for
every one destroyed by the enemy; and also that the death
of every soldier is a considerable pecuniary loss to the country,
and to each and every one of its citizens.
The amount of this loss is made up of many items—the cost
of his enlistment, his pay and his rations, while he was an in
efficient recruit, the bounties that must be paid to replace him,
and the pension which his death or disability charges on the
public ; and to these must be added his worth to the nation as
a producer, had he survived the war, and returned to the indus
trial pursuits of civil life. The average money value to the
people of each soldier in the service is certainly not less than
one thousand dollars.
Men are not among the commodities we buy and sell; but
they are bought and sold elsewhere, or have been ; and an ablebodied male adult has never been held worth much less than
that sum to his owner. A Northern mechanic or farmer is cer
tainly worth as much to the country. The loss of a single
soldier by death or disability adds at least that amount to the
expenses of the war, and to the burthen it necessarily imposes
on every member of the community.
Rigorous economy of the life and health of our soldiers is
practically most important, therefore, to every tax-payer, and to
every holder of Government Securities. Whether the Sanitary
Commission does enough toward this great object to make it
worth the people’s while to sustain it (at the cost of nearly
fifty thousand dollars a month), is the question the people is now
esked to consider and decide.
Leaving out of view all its other work, the Commission cer
�tainly saved not less than one thousand lives within forty-eight
hours after Antietam. If each of these was worth as much to
the country as the average South Carolina field hand to his
owner, then the Commission, by its work at this one point,
returned to the country more than an equivalent, in money
value, for the nine hundred thousand dollars the country has
given its Central Treasury during the last two years. But this
is only a single incident of one branch of the work it has been
doing ever since the war began.
In view of facts like this, the Commission submits the case,
without misgiving, to the intelligence of the People. The
value of all property throughout the country depends on the
success of the National cause, and every property-holder has a
personal interest in whatever promotes it. In no way can it
be more surely promoted than by retrenchment of the cost of
war; and the Commission claims that its efforts to this end
have thus far saved the People at least two dollars for every
dollar it has been enabled to expend.
It will make no attempt to raise the sum required to keep it
in operation through the instrumentalities usually employed for
like purposes. If means be freely supplied, as heretofore, the
work of the Commission will be kept up, but, if not, it will be
abandoned; and, to keep it up, not less than two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars must be raised before the 1st of February.
1864.
For the purpose of ascertaining what the People is disposed
to give, it is recommended that the several branches of the Com
mission proceed at once to ascertain, by public meetings, or
otherwise, what sum their respective cities will contribute for
the general purposes of the Commission, and report the result
to its General Secretary Dr. J. Foster Jenkins, No. 823 Broad
way, New York.
Those who are satisfied that the work of the Commission is
�58
one not only of mercy and humanity, but of substantial service
to the country, and who are able and willing to aid it, will send
their contributions to its Treasurer, Geo. T. Strong, No. 68 Wall
Street, or 823 Broadway, New York.
By order of the Commission.
Henry W. Bellows,
Wm. H. Van Buren,
x
Wolcott Gibbs,
C. R. Agnew,
B
I
j
\Committee.
Same. G. Howe,
Horace Binney, Jr.,
I
J. Huntington Wolcott, |
Fairman Rogers,
1
Geo. T. Strong,
J
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A
APPENDIX A.
........ . ...... —
......
SUPPLIES DISTRIBUTED DURING AND IMMEDIATELY
AFTER THE BATTLES AT GETTYSBURG,
JULY 1st, 2d and 3d, .1863.
—-----—
Of Articles of Clothing, etc., viz.:
Of
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
•“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
Drawers, (woolen) 5,310 pairs............................................ $9,292 50
“
(cotton) 1,833 pairs.......................... ...................
1,833 00
Shirts, (woolen) 7,158....................................
• 14,316 00
“
(cotton) 3,266............................................................
3,266 00
Pillows, 2,114................
1,268 40
Pillow Cases, 264..................................................................
105 60
Bed Sacks, 1,630..................................................................
3,463 75
Blankets, 1,007..... .........................
3,021 00
Sheets, 274.................................. '.........................................
274 00
Wrappers, 508.......................................................................
1,498 60
Handkerchiefs, 2,659............................................
319 08
Stockings, (woolen) 3,560 pairs..........................................
1,780 00
“
(cotton) 2,258 pairs..........................................
451 60
Bed Utensils, 728..................................................................
182 00
Towels and Napkins, 10,000................................................. *1,500 00
Sponges, 2,300.................................................................... . •
230 00
Combs, 1,500......... ............ ...........'...........................
75 00
Buckets, 200..................
60 00
Soap, (Castile) 250 pounds...................................................
50 00
Oil Silk, 300 yards................................... '............................
225 00
Tin Basins, Cups, etc., 7,000..............................................
*700 00
Old Linen, Bandages, etc., 110barrels...............................
1,100 00
Water Tanks, 7...................................................................
70 00
Water Coolers, 46...............................................................
230 00
Bay Rum and Cologne Water, 225bottles.......................
*112 50
Carried forward'.......... *
...............
$45,624 03
�60
Brought forward....................................................... $45,624 03
Of
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
Fans, 3,500............................................................................
145 00
Chloride of Lime, 11 barrels.........................
99 00
Shoes and Slippers, 4,000 pairs........................................... *2,400 00
Crutches, 1,200.............................
480 00
Lanthorns, 180..........................................
90 00
Candles, 350 pounds............................................................
*70 00
Canvas, 300 square yards....................................................
360 00
Musquito Netting, 648 pieces..............................................
810 00
Paper, 237 quires..................................................................
23 70
Pants, Coats, Hats, 189 pieces............................................
*96 75
Plaster, 16 rolls........................
4 00
Of Articles of Sustenance, viz.:
Of Fresh Poultry and Mutton, 11,000 pounds.....................
“
“ Butter, 6,430 pounds.................................................
“
“ Eggs, (chiefly collected forthe occasion at farm
houses in Pennsylvania and New Jersey,) 8,500
dozens....................................................................
4‘
“ Garden Vegetables, 675bushels........................
“
“ Berries, 48 bushels.....................................................
u
“ Bread, 12,900 loaves..................................................
“ Ice, 20,000 pounds..............................................................
“ Concentrated Beef Soup, 3,800 pounds..............
“
“
Milk, 12,500 pounds...................
“ Prepared Farinaceous Food, 7,000 pounds........................
“ Dried Fruit, 3,500 pounds..................................................
“ Jellies and Conserves, 2,000 jars.........................................
“ Tamarinds, 750 gallons.......................................................
w Lemons, 116 boxes..............................................................
“ Oranges, 46 boxes......... ..........................
“ Coffee, 850 pounds...............................................................
“ Chocolate, 831 pounds.........................................................
“ Tea, 426 pounds...................................................................
“ White Sugar, 6,800 pounds...............................................
4‘ Syrups, (Lemon, etc.) 785 bottles.......................................
u Brandy, 1,250 bottles............................................................
u Whiskey, 1,168 bottles.........................................................
u Wine, 1,148 bottles................................................. *...........
1,540 00
1,286 00
1,700
337
^2
645
100
3,800
3,125
700
350
1,000
600
580
230
272
249
383
1,156
596
1,250
^60
861
00
50
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
30
40
00
25
00
80
00
Carried forward............. ,..........................................$71,736 73
�61
Brought forward...................................
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
u
Biscuit, Crackers, and Rusk, 134 barrels............................
Preserved Meats, 500 pounds...............................................
Preserved Fish, 3,600 pounds...................
Pickles, 400 gallons..............................................................
Tobacco, ICO pounds..............
Tobacco Pipes, 1,000........................ .................................
Indian Meal, 1,621 pounds...................................................
Starch,-1,074 pounds......................
Codfish, 3,848 pounds..................................... 7.................
Canned Fruit, 582 cans........................... .......... ftte.
$71,736
180
*670
125
720
120
70
5
40
75
269
436
“
“
“
“
“
“
Oysters, 72 cans...............................................
Brandy Peaches, 303 jars..............................................
Catsup, 43 jars...................................................
Vinegar, 24 bottles............................................
Jamaica Ginger, 43 jars........................................................
36
303
11
3
37
Of Ale, 600 gallons....................................................................
73
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
50
18
36
50
00
00
00
00
25
Total........................................................................... $74,838 52
* Estimated value.
J 'iJ X.
�While this paper is passing through the press, information is received
that a Branch of the U. S. Sanitary Commission has just been organized
at Paris, and is entering with energy on its legitimate work of col
lecting money and supplies from loyal Americans abroad, and from all
others who sympathize with us in our National struggle.
The following is an abstract of the official report of its proceedings up
to 4th December, instant, transmitted to the Standing Committee in New
York;
A meeting of American gentlemen was held at the American Consulate,
Paris, November 30th, 4863, for the purpose of organizing a Paris Branch
of the United States Sanitary Commission.
The Rev. John McClintock, D.D., was duly appointed President, and
Mr. James W. Brooks, Vice-Consul of the United States, Secretary pro
tern.
An Executive Committee was appointed, consisting of the following
named gentlemen :
Rev. John McClintock, D.D., (Pastor of the American Chapel, Paris.)
Mr. John Bigelow, U. S. Consul.
Mr. Chas. S. P. Bowles, Boston.
Mr. Edward Brooks,
do.
Dr. T. W. Evans, Paris.
Mr. Robt. M. Mason, Boston.
Mr. Geo. T. Richards, Paris.
Mr. J. Phalen, New York.
Mr. Wm. H. Thomson, New York.
Mr. Henry Wood, Boston.
Such Committee to have general supervision of the action of the Paris
Branch, subject to the approval of the Central Board of the Commission,
with power to fill its own vacancies.
�63
Mr. Geo. T. Richards was appointed Treasurer, and Mr. Wm. B. Bowles
Secretary, such appointments to be subject to the approval of the Central
Board.
The Secretary was instructed to provide books of subscription, prefaced
with a statement of the character and objects of the organization.
The meeting then adjourned.
A meeting of the Executive Committee Was held at the office of Messrs.
J. Munroe & Co., No. Rue de la Paix, Paris.
Present—Rev. John McClintock, D.D., and Messrs. Robt. M. Mason,
Wm. S. Thompson, Edward Brooks, Geo. S. Richards. Henry Woods,
Charles S. P. Bowles and Wm. Bowles, General Secretary of the Paris
Branch of the U. S. Sanitary Commission. •
Dr. McClintock • was, on motion, duly elected Chairman of the Com
mittee, and Mr. Wm. B. Bowles Secretary.
The minutes of the preliminary meeting was read and approved.
A list of names of gentlemen on whom it was thought best to wait for
subscriptions, was submitted and approved.
It was resolved that the Secretary open a correspondence with American
Consuls, and with prominent American citizens residing in Europe, with a
view to the extension and increased efficiency of this Branch of the Com
mission.
Resolved,—That the title of the Branch be “ The European Branch
»
the
United States Sanitary Commission.”
Mr. Wm. S. Thompson offered his name as one of ten to subscribe five
thousand francs each for the objects of the European Branch.
Adjourned to meet at the same place 6th December instant, at 3 P. M.
The European Branch appears to have established its permanent head
quarters at No. 2 Rue Martel, Paris, and to have already raised a con
siderable amount which it bolds subject to the orders of the Commission,
and which can be used abroad to very great advantage in the purchase of
certain articles of hospital supply.
This creation of a Branch of the Commission amoDg loyal Americans
on the other side of the Atlantic is especially gratifying, because it,has
oeen wholly spontaneous. It shows that this new work, invented by the
American People, and by them practically applied for the first time in
�history, through the Sanitary Commission—of supplying an army with
an additional staff of Volunteer Commissaries, Quartermasters and Sur
geons, working in harmony with its military authorities, and vested with
discretionary powers that enable them to do whatever the necessary in
flexibility of military regulations obliges Government officials to leave un
done—commends itself to the heads and to the hearts of loyal Americans
wherever they may be.
This extension of the influence and agencies of the Commission into
Europe suggests the mention of another fact of like interest, which
may be due to the example the Commission has set, and may prove a
material step in the progress of mankind toward the mitigation of the
evils incident to war. An “ International Conference ” of representatives
of the several European States met at Geneva last October, and has
published a voluminous report of its deliberations and transactions.
Its object is to establish a Sanitary Commission for the army of
every European Power. It proposes that, in case of war, each army—
French, Austrian, Russian, or as the case may be—shall have its staff
of Sanitary and Relief Agents, representing an International organiza
tion, whose duty it shall be impartially to succor and relieve all the sick
and wounded among friends and enemies alike, and whose office shall
make their persons sacred and inviolable, and secure them against cap
ture, injury, or interference.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Statement of the object and methods of the Sanitary Commission appointed by the Government of the United States, June 13, 1861
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United States Sanitary Commission
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Place of Publication: New York, N.Y.
Collation: 64 p. ; 23 cm.
Series Title: United States Sanitary Commission ; Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission
Series No: 69
Notes: 'Published by its direction' [Title page]. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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1863
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G5384
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (Statement of the object and methods of the Sanitary Commission appointed by the Government of the United States, June 13, 1861), identified by <a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a>, is free of known copyright restrictions.
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Health
American Civil War
Conway Tracts
Medical care-Law and legislation
Public Health-United States of America
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Text
t |Jl,
Cannon
ife
Nu&f
I A FREE STATE
AND
FREE MEDICINE.
BY
JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON.
LONDON: F. PITMAN, 20, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.O.
GLASGOW : JOHN THOMSON, 39, JOHN STREET.
1870.
�“ New foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.”
Milton.
�I.
A FREE STATE, AND FREE MEDICINE.
The pages headed Medical Freedom, appended to this
Essay, formed a postscript to a small work of mine on a
new Treatment of Small Pox, written some years ago.
*
Their re-publication has been undertaken because it has
been thought that they have work to do at the present
time. I wrote them in good part from the theoretical
side, having a clear certainty that the separation of medicine
from government, and from power, and the dischartering
of all medical corporations, would confer upon medicine
and the community the greatest benefits. I foresaw that
freedom had a future here of which protection could give
no inkling; and that Art, Science, Service, Healing, would
live anew from it upon a hitherto unknown scale. I
pleaded gently in the interest of medicine and the com
munity.
The pages are reprinted as they stood, with some medical
topics adhering to them.
But now in the face of recent acts and facts, I plead in
the name and interest of the community alone : of the
consumer, not of the producer: of the British people
struggling with bonds, not of the banded and enthralled
medical corporations and profession. The medical pro
* On the Cure, Arrest, and Isolation of Small Pox, by a New Method ; and
on the Local Treatment of Erysipelas, and all Internal Inflammations; with a
Special Chapter on Cellulitis ; and a Postscript on Medical Fkeedom. London :
Leath & Ross, 1864.
�4
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
fession has crept into the Government, and is inciting it to
breaches of most sacred freedom, and thus is virtually at
war, and dreadful to say is influencing the Liberal and
Freetrade Gladstone Ministry to war, with the nation.
The particulars are not far to seek, and need not detain
me long, especially as I am about soon, in a larger Essay,
to treat of them severally. Suffice it now to say that,
I. War is levied upon the population by the Parlia
mentary Jet of Compulsory Vaccination. Vaccination may
be bad or good in its results; so may aconite, or arsenic,
or the sword; but no goodness of it justifies the violation
by it of unwilling families. Parliament has no excuse for
it. If Vaccination be protective, whoso will can be pro
tected by it; and leave those who do not choose to be
vaccinated, to their own freewill, to bear the risk. A large
and increasing body of the population hates the name and
thought of Vaccination; numerous cases are extant in
every considerable town of deterioration of health, injury,
and death from it, inflicted upon little children; and
coroner’s inquests return verdicts of “ died from the con
sequences of Vaccination;” and yet Parliament arms the
medical man with a right of virus against the babies next
born to those who have thus been slaughtered, and sends
the fathers or mothers who cannot pay continual fines, to
prison. In this Act Parliament commits a breach of the
peace as wide as Great Britain and Ireland, for it directly
incites to violent retribution. It is obvious that riot may
come of it. And it is equally obvious that if a mother or
father can say to the virus-man, “ Sir, I believe in my soul,
from dire experience in my own family, or my neighbour’s,
that what you are bent upon doing to my baby will pollute
its health, and probably take its life, and I will resist it to
the death, and rouse my neighbourhood to resist it,”—it is
obvious that whatever weapon that woman or that man
uses to protect, not only his fireside, but the very blood of
his race; and whatever arousing of the passions of his
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
5
commune he may cause against his poisoners, the public
opinion of the world will justify him, as much as if he
shot down a midnight assassin from his wife’s and child’s
bedside.
Yet Parliament has sanctioned this perpetual felony and
occasional murder in this compulsory Act; and Parliament
will now have to unsanction the Act, and to destroy it.
Nothing of this would have happened if medicine had
had no more to do with Government than any other calling
has; but medicine has got into the State, and instead of
being called when wanted, it is itself ensconced in office;
the State has lost its service, and got its impertinence, and
any foothold of power, or patronage, or pay, that it has, it
will by no means surrender. Old Physic, thus officialized,
revels in the application of the Compulsory Vaccination
Law, and hunts out the children of those who are known
Anti-vaccinators with especial zest. Nor does it forget
that hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling are the
reward of what so many now regard as the pollution and
slaughter of the innocents. The pressure of the despotism
is so urgent, that Vaccinators will not listen to medical
certificates against Vaccination, on the score of skin disease,
whooping cough, or the like : fine, imprisonment, or sub
mission, are the unconditional demand of the Government
doctors.
And this for a disease which killed eleven people in
London last week, while scarlatina killed more than a
hundred.
I am not now arguing against Vaccination, but against
Compulsory Vaccination; but I am prepared to argue un
reservedly against Vaccination itself when the occasion
arises. I know that it is a delusion and an evil, and I have
done with it. But my point here is that chartered medicine
has polluted and endangered the State with it, where un
chartered medicine would have had no chance of doing so;
and that hence arises a mighty practical reason why the
�6
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
State should discharter all medical corporations, withdraw
all royal patents from them, and leave physic, like other
businesses, to its own unaided work; calling it in for
an opinion when necessary, but judging that opinion by no
professional standard, but by wide and high common sense;
and being entirely free to act upon it or not when the
opinion is delivered, and the doctor gone from Downing
Street.
The plainest medical reason, or medical truth, may not
be expedient or good for a statesman to carry out. If
Jenner or Watson could prove ever so clearly that by dis
secting alive the vilest felon some desired medical light
would shine forth, it would still be competent for the
Home Secretary to say, 11 No, gentlemen, wait for that!
A generation had better die without benefit of illuminated
doctors, than that its life should be bought in the coins of
hellish cruelty. That vile man is my brother, and the State
stands in the interest of a higher light and life against the
pretended medical good that is to come of disembowelling
him.”
And so the State shall say one day, better let epidemic
smallpox sweep our towns, than Vaccination outrage hearts
and homes under the pretence of abating it. Not that
epidemic smallpox will do it, dear reader, for epidemic
smallpox is for the most part a panic ; though when it
does occur in a bad form, Vaccination has no power to
protect against it. But better the desolation which medi
cine and sanitary action could grapple with at last, than
the moral and personal violation of the homes and children
of our commonwealth.
II. This, then, is the first battleground between the British
Nation and the Chartered Medical Profession.
*
The
* I refer the reader to the Essay on Vaccination, by Chas. T. Pearce, M.D.,
Loudon, 1868; to the Essay of Dr. Bayard; to the Anti-Vaccinator; and in
general to the publications of the Anti-Vaccination League, for full information
against the Utility of Vaccination, and about the injuries it causes, and the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
7
second and equally serious, but not more serious, battle
ground, is in the Contagious Diseases Act, lately passed
by Parliament, for districts where soldiers are housed, and
now proposed for extension to the whole civil community.
This Act too, passed surreptitiously under a misleading
name, would not have become law but that chartered
medicine was at the ear of the central Government as its
only adviser. The process evidently is, to send for “ the
most eminent medical men,” and be bound by their advice.
This course is both misleading and servile; and the mis
direction and the servility both depend upon royal charters.
Thus, “ the most eminent medical men,” to a Minister of
State’s apprehension, are inevitably at the head of the
orthodox corporations; and hence the minister gets arrant
orthodoxy, whose power of poohpoohing is its supreme
faculty, in place of wide and varied experience. He gets
infallibility instead of heart and brains. And instead of
getting orthodoxy as an opinion, he receives it as a com
mand ; and if he must have medical action at all, he has
nothing to hold orthodoxy in check as the agent. Even a
Gladstone can call in nobody else but these pampered and
easily incensed Mandarins. Our ministry, methinks, should
be the highest present jury of the country, giving its inde
pendent verdict after patiently hearing professional judge
and professional advocates ; but in such cases as these it is
hopelessly charged and commanded by the bench, and the
barristers are with the bench in overruling its twelveman
common sense, and forcing the verdict against it.
This is well divulged in a paper by an eminent orthodox
medical lady, Miss Elizabeth Garrett. “ Is legislation
increased death-rate that coincides with it. By this practice the medical
profession has introduced a new disease into the human race; and by the two
Acts under question, two new tyrannies are added to the evils of our country.
And in the case of Vaccination, from a practice not a hundred years old, but
which the doctors seen! to think is as durable as the rock of ages, though the
counter-experiment of letting Vaccination alone has not been tried ; and, con.
sequently, there is no test of its value in any sense, excepting as a fee-field of
the doctors.
�8
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
[about syphilitic diseases] necessary ? ” she asks, and
answers, “ This is strictly a professional question, upon which
the opinion of trustworthy medical witnesses ought to be
accepted as final. It is enough if unprofessional persons
know what that opinion is, together with some of the prin
cipal facts upon which it is based.” We have heard of
the Rule of the Monk, in Rome, and here is the parallel
Rale of the Doctor in Britain. You are no longer to call
in the doctor, and employ him as long as you like his
treatment, and judge with your own common sense every
serious proposal in that treatment; but he, or she, by
Heaven, is to call you in, and do what he likes with you !
You are his bond slave, and his word is, Flat experimentuni
in corpore tuo—vilissimo.
“ Is legislation necessary ? ” Who is to answer that
question, Miss Garrett ? Who calls in legislators, who are
a high order of professionals ? The people of course.
Air. Gladstone is where he is because the household suff
ragans have placed him there, and keep him there so long
as they have confidence in him. He is bound to consult
with his employers upon all matters pertaining to their
own bodies and fortunes. He has to legislate in their best
interest. On medical questions he avails himself of or
thodox eminent advice; he calls the doctors in as the
householders have called him in. But he is to legislate;
they are not to legislate. The opinion they give is strictly
a professional one; but the question of whether, or how, it
shall be carried out is not professional, excepting so far as
statecraft is a profession; it is a legislative question ; and
the settlement of it lies in the will of the people, and then
in the derivative wise will of the ministry. If the opinions
of callings were to be converted into the immediate volitions
of the State, we should have a pretty time of it. The
State would be garrotted by a hundred small ruffians of
professions. “ Nothing like leather” would be the rallying
cry of every cobbler’s onset on his premier. Miss Garrett’s
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
9
baker would force her into vegetarianism, for the food of
the people is strictly an eminent baker’s question; and the
chief of the bakers must be “ accepted by her as final.”
A homoeopathic premier might call in homoeopathic emi
nence, and converting his eminence’s answer into an edict,
forbid her salts and senna and blue pill for the rest of her
orthodox days.
A professional opinion, however eminent, is not then a
legislative question at all, but a mere suggestion, unless a
legislator takes it up ; and moreover, the whole unprofes
sional mass of the country is the permanent jury which
gives the verdict of To do, or Not to do, in every case.
What are the grounds upon which a legislator as distin
guished from “an expert” or professsional specialist must
act ? The expert, you will observe, merely takes his own
medical view of the case, modified of course by his good
sense, and moral and spiritual capacities ; but the medical
view is central. The statesman—I do not accept him as
“ final ”—-is distinguished from the lesser professional man
in this chiefly, that he has all the interests, not merely the
sanitary interests, to help and not to harm. First of all,
the interest of impartiality ; that is the justice-rock on
which he stands. Then, co-extensive with the common
wealth, social interests, spiritual interests, humanitary
interests, bodily interests, moral interests. The order and
poise of all these together in his mind, each like the organs
of a sound body pressing the rest into shape and function,
is the ground of the wisdom of every special action of the
statesman; and makes him neither a philanthropist, nor a
divine, nor a philosopher, nor a sanitarian, nor a moralist;
but a legislator, and a professional statesman. His will is
never reached by any other one profession separately.
Woe be to him if ever he allows that will to be first
violated and then traversed by any doctor or specialist who
represents one partial interest where all interests should
�10
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
be most generously constellated, and a love and wisdom
above interest itself should reign.
The obverse of this, the position assumed by Miss Garrett,
that the people have nothing to do with her foul physic
but to shut their eyes and take it, is the common stupidity
of chartered and collegiate bodies. I leave it to the reader
to imagine whether such dense darkness against human
right, and the human mind, and the all prevalent good
sense of mankind, is a favourable atmosphere for scientific
studies, or the prosecution of the most free and instinctive
of all the arts, the Art of Healing. For my own part I do
not doubt that the conceit and love of power bred of
charters and patronage rob medical men and women of
their best inspirations, and reduce to a minimum the
humane vigour of their lives.
But to return to the Contagious Diseases Act.
As some of my readers do not know what it is, I will
tell them.
First, it is founded on the present fact that the most of
soldiers must be unmarried ; and secondly, on the pre
sumed fact that unmarried soldiers must have women for
their gratification; and thirdly, on the fact that if their
women are diseased, they disease the soldiers, and cause
added expense for the army. Wherefore, it is expedient
to keep the women well for use, which can only be done
by compulsorily examining them at short intervals, and
when needful, compulsorily curing them. For this purpose
they are summoned from very wide districts, one and all,
and come in crowds, to the place of inquisition, the wallow
ing with the tidy, the vilest with the neatest; and they are
examined, very often (I do not know how often, but it
ought to be tabled) with large steel tubes, called specula, and
if diseased, sent to hospital, and if healthy, let back to whore
dom. Purer women may be brought by the police, by
mistake, or by the plotting of villains by design, into the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
11
same category ; and if they do not take care, or, as Miss
Garrett says, are “ helpless,” which a good many good
women are, they may become liable to fortnightly exposure
and looking at, and steel entry, for one twelvemonth ; and
their husbands have no remedy, because the Act has con
doned the police mistake, and probably veiled the villain’s
plot, by anticipation.
This system, its advocates say, has diminished venereal
disease in array districts, and also the number of pros
titutes ; where it has been applied with the utmost strin
gency, as in the little island of Malta, it has “ stamped
out ” the disease ; and it only remains to apply it to the
whole of Great Britain and Ireland, to extinguish this
disease altogether. Let, then, every common woman in
the three kingdoms be inspected fortnightly—police super
intendents being the judges of who are bad women—and
let hospitals, big enough to take in all who are diseased,
be erected from one end of the land to the other.
A tall medical vision ! Building contractors who could
get on that shoddy Pisgah, would give a handsome per
centage to chartered and patented physic for the admin
istration of the vast disbursement. They need only read
Mr. Simon’s clear'pamphlet to estimate the amazing carcase
to which they would be fain eagles.
But if you can desyphilize little Malta, till a new regi
ment, or a new ship of war comes, it does not follow that
you can do the same for Greater Britain. When I was a
boy there was a current saying, “ Naturam expellas furca,
tamen usque recurret” You may drive out nature with a
pitchfork, but she will always come back again. If you
could clear all prostitution from the streets, so that the
sharpest police superintendent should not know who is
who, you might only, I will say at present you would only,
drive immorality out of sight, and lodge it higher up in
the community. I should like to know if Devonport,
endorsed by Miss Garrett’s “ clergy,” is more moral
�12
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
because its 2000 inspected prostitutes have diminished
from 2000 in 1864 to 770 in 1870. I should like to
know from the dissenting ministers of the district the state
altogether of the 770 who do the work of the former 2000.
It strikes me forcibly, that you may scare prostitutes away
at the expense of bringing up servant girls secretly into
their ranks. And these, being uninspected, all the in
fection begins over again in your own kitchens. And as
masters are often immoral with their servants, and innocent
wives and children must be protected, all you can do then
is to suspect every woman below your own rank, and to
have her inspected ; and presently you will find the old
hospitals bursting with their contents into new ones:
bursting, not like Aaron’s rods, but like spawning serpents.
Truly the medical plot thickens. We have got our reward
for protecting physic ; for adopting Miss Garrett’s principle
that the first topmost medical opinion should be taken, and
that then it should override every other faculty and concern,
and be converted into direct and universal legislation.
Out, I say, upon a protected orthodoxy which would
introduce such a horrid tapeworm into our national con
stitution ; if for no other reason, then for this reason, of
saving bodies and souls, give us freedom from State medi
cine, and let medicine herself be remitted to her own
resources, and have a conscience void of public offence,—the blessing in the humility of freedom.
Could Miss Garrett’s orthodoxy be carried out, Great
Britain would swarm with a vermin of pensioned venereal
doctors more than Spain, or Italy, or Turkey, ever swarmed
with beggar priests. Great Britain would have syphilis
with a vengeance.
But, reader, it cannot be carried
out. The Dissenters will not have it, because they can
scarcely understand the vice of which the diseases in
question are some of the plagues, and they will never
sanction the endowment and establishment of the pre
tended cure of those plagues in the interest of the vice.
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
13
The Municipalities will not have it, because they have
great radical works of good needing all their monies and
means, and they do not hold these to be spent on stopgaps
of an evil which in its retreat will more deeply and des
perately defy them. The public exchequer will not have
it (on its own shoulders), because the prostitutes and their
medical bishops, many tens of thousands strong in London
alone, would devour the treasury. The Married will not
have it, because they see that its tendency is to drive
prostitution, and whatever disease adheres to it, from the skin
of the streets, inwards into homes, and upon the vital parts
of the community. The vast Working Classes will not have
it, because their daughters are those in the main who will
first be invaded by the inspreading of the surgeons and their
poxes. Common Sense will not have it, because common
sense seeks cure and not suppression; and common hope,
which is the sister of common sense, knows that cure is pos
sible ; and that necessity of fornication is a chimera which
has no existence, but is merely the horrible shadow pro
jected before the eyes of a chartered and decayed society,
and cleared at once from the heart and brain of a loving,
an ennobled and a progressive society. The statesmen of
these advancing times will not have it, because it has
nothing to do with statecraft; and because they will see
that they are only general managers for the nation, and that
if in the interest of special people they were to undertake
a special stamping out of evils ; a special hospitalling of all
broken and ruined people, the ground would be cumbered
with a Bedlam-city of hospitals, medical, legal, clerical,
*
commercial, legislative, royal, and the only two classes left,
* Dr. Dalrymple, M.P., is moving in this direction, and asks the State to
erect pillars which will hold all drunkards upright, and Mr. Bruce, the Home
Secretary, instead of teaching the lion, member that the State will be happy
to do this as soon as any great wit shows how the State, which finds it hard
itself to be upright, can hold everybody upright—advises him “ to try his
hand at a Bill on the subject.” Mr. Bruce ought to bo moro merciful to
retired physicians.
�14
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
besides statesmen, would be inspectors, and patients.
This, the logical carrying out of the Act, would be hell
realized upon earth, with the Inquisition for its portico.
And last and first, the awakened Womanhood of the
land will not have it. I dare not know, Why, in the
woman’s way, because I am not a woman ; but I do
know that they will not because they will not. Their
reasons are made of fire in such a case, and could burn
up a household parliament which is made of parchment
presently. They will not have troopers fed by govern
ment on the carcases of their sex ; on carcases stamped
with the government permit; they know all over that
state prohibition and non-prohibition are the two halves
in all licensing. They will feel with those eyes of the heart
which see and more than see, which are all senses in one
touch, that the shame days of the state are their shame
days, and that fortnight by fortnight common modesty is
being effaced from the lowest women to the highest ; and
that purity is freshly trampled every time in the slums
of the filthiest rumour. They will know by the heart
the secrets of the prison-house ; the surgeons and the
unwilling women’s bodies ; the struggle and the steel,
office and agony ; the fairest searcht the foulest. They
will hate men while they love them, till men, public and
private, leave bad womanhood unworsened. They will
hate a government which crowns the infamy of prostitu
tion with the last ignominy and wrong, of public state
ravin and state rape. They will hate the medical govern
ment dogma which lies to mothers and sisters and
affianced brides of the necessity of prostitution, and proclaimes it as a natural office of the community, young
and old ; the dogma which postpones love to lust, which
it is woman’s severest mission to correct in man. They
will quell and choke the medical assertion that their baby
boys are born whoremongers, and that some poorer mother’s
baby girls are their predestined skittles in the game of
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
15
ruin. They will believe that God is love, and that Christ
is incarnate love, and that love is the Creator, and love
is the hope, and love is the Redeemer; and they will have
nothing licensed but love which is the licenser. None of
these are dead men’s reasons; but men’s best reasons
unloved and unaccepted by women, will be poor stubble
in the days of fire which are coming, in the days of
woman which are coming, in the holy days which are
coming.
And ah ! later than last, the slow Manhood of the
country will rise upon these Acts, and their authors. The
chronic meanness of the State, which has confiscated
woman to man, which has made the huge freedom of
marriage into the gulf and abyss of her person and her
property, will begin to be avenged from the ground up
wards, and the sexes will tear up this lowest wrong with
even hands. We men in truth have not known what we
were doing. All uncorrected, unchastened, unmated, in
our public conscience, we have been cruel and greedy as
impuberous boys, and have ravaged the holdings and
trampled out the capacities of woman on the floors of long
parliaments. We have been a sour and an unmarried
country. We are awakening and ripening at last. The
scorn of women is awakening us ; the new power of women
is awakening us; the fiery justice of women is awakening
us; the angry commonweal and coming democracy of
women is awakening us; and we are going to help our
mothers and wives and all our sisters out of the State
chains of unrighteous laws and customs. Out of sex
legislation, and sex-oppression. Out of one morality for
women, and another for men. Out of the household
political Mahometanism that women to the State have no
separate souls. Out of the claws of chartered surgery.
Out of homes that are prisons, and out of brothels that
are graves.
It is now no digression to see that the questions raised by
�16
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
these two seemingly small acts of parliament directly move
the issue of Woman’s Universal Suffrage. All women have
the offices, of protecting their babes, and of caring for their
own sex to whatever deep depths its unfortunates may
have fallen. The public will of woman is summoned forth
by God’s providence when she is publicly assailed in her
womanhood and her home. That which is coming to
answer the call, is not female household suffrage, for that is
another enchanter and chaunter of property, but true univer
sal suffrage, which is the Word of all Souls ■ truly, I will
say, the voice of God more and more audible in progressive
nations. And these Acts of Parliament, if women will
but speedily stamp them out, will be the beginning of the
dav when not woman’s dishonours, but her soul of honour
will be public; when the State in its coldest departments
will begin to know the beating of her heart.
I have now told you faintly some of the reasons why
this Act shall not be extended, and who those are that will
not have it; and I find on carefully looking round that,
judging by the past, the only things that will have it, if
they can, arc the church and the state, including chartered
physic.
So much then for the extension of the Act. But now I
will say further that the present Army Act will not be kept
on the statute book. In the first place, the army which is
said to necessitate it, must go, and give place to an army
which docs not require an episcopacy of prostitution, or to
no.army at all. We are in profound peace, are giving up the
defence of our colonies from home, and there is no disaffec
tion within our borders which a larger commonwealth-heart
would not appease. Gibraltar, and Malta, and Aden, and
the islands of the sea, ought to belong to themselves first,
and next, to the whole world. Excepting for India, where
a humane system of mounted police in plain clothes may
protect the real interests of the country and our own plant
of railway and other property there, we have no need of a
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
17
standing army. We have less need of an army than the
United States has. But as for the graduation of dis
banding, and putting all the remaining men into plain
policemen’s clothes—the symbols of peacekeeping, whereas
the red coats are the symbols of the glories—of slaughter
of males, and seduction of females—as for the disbanding,
the unmarried men, after the horrid treatment they have
survived, should be paid off handsomely, and sent if they
wish it to Canada, or in the “ flying squadron ” to any
other part of the world ; and the married ones, as a
nucleus to national volunteers, should receive a large incre
ment of pay ; <£300 a-year income will be little enough, and
a farm apiece on the crown lands, or in the ducal deso
lations of Argyleshire and Sutherlandshire; for there is no
more reason why an army should be a cheap thing, than
why a Queen should be cheap, or why an Archbishop of
Canterbury should be cheap, or why a Marquis of West
minster should be cheap. This simple plan will render the
Contagious Act unnecessary.
I object, then, to the present Contagious Act, because it
would bolster up our present bestial system —our Sodom
*
* See what the Government and the household suffragans of this country,
the bishops and clergy, and all the classes whose wealth and state are supposed
to be protected by the army, in short, all but the lower classes and the women,
are responsible for in regard to their army. Dr. Stallard says, in the Sessional
Proceedings of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,
‘ My attention was first directed to the subject by making an attempt to
determine the most convenient number of soldiers who should be accommo
dated in one room. As to the opinion of the commanding officers, I found it
on this subject in general opposition to that of the soldiers. They advocate
large rooms containing not less than eighteen men, and they prefer those with
twenty-five. They do this on the ground of supervision being more easily
exercised, for, with but few exceptions, they are in favour of complete publicity.
There must be no cupboards, no lockers. If the soldier has any money, or
articles on which he sets store, he must keep them in his pockets since he has
nowhere else to put them; and if he keeps over, from time to time, some
portion of his midday meal, he must expose it on the shelf, where it will soon
be covered with dust and dirt from the sweepings of the floor. But as regards
the men, without exception, they prefer a room for eighteen to one for twenty,
five, a room for twelve to one for eighteen, a room for eight to one for twelve,
B
�w
18
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
and Gomorrlia system—with our poor army; because in
so far as it maintains prostitution healthy, it must make
a room for four to one for eight; and those soldiers who have been quartered
in an old prison, now used as a barrack in Dublin, testified that they were
never so comfortably lodged.
*
*
*
The first and great objection
felt by the decent soldier is the entire absence of privacy. From the time of
his enlistment to the date of his discharge there is not a moment or a place
which he can call his own in the fullest sense of the term. He washes, dresses,
eats, drinks, and sleeps in public. Let me try and represent what this publicity
really means. Of his twenty-four comrades it will be absolutely certain that
two or three will be habitual drunkards, and one or two will have been in
prison for some crime. Some commanding officers expressly order the worst
characters in the company to be quartered with the best, with the view of
reformation; indeed this is one of the great arguments used in favour of the
congregation of so many men together.
“ But, as one black sheep infects the flock, so, instead of improving, the bad
soldier often makes the others worse. Naturally, and unless modified by the
presence of a very superior non-commissioned officer, the moral standard of a
barrack-room is that of almost the worst man in it. The more men the worse
and more extensive is the mischief, and the greater is the discomfort inflicted
upon a really decent man. No doubt the presence of a good barrack-room
corporal modifies the evil; but even the power of the best is limited. He is
only a step above the rest, and his life would be unbearable if he were to be
very strict. He is obliged to wink at a great deal which it is his duty to report.
It is well known, for example, that drunkenness escapes report. A man died
of delirium tremens, at Portsmouth, who had gone to bed drunk every night for
more than twenty years, and yet that man had never been convicted, and held
a good conduct medal. There is also a great deal of behaviour which ranges
between fun and torture, of which the non-commissioned officer in charge can
take no notice.
“ An old soldier informed me that he has frequently known a recruit to go to
bed night after night in his clothes, in fear of the remarks and ridicule which
the act of undressing would certainly give rise to. And the public use of that
military institution called the urine tub, is the moment chosen for remarks and
practical jokes of the most disgusting kind.
“ Woe be to the recruit who has any personal defect or peculiarity, and,
above all, to one who has any religious feeling. The attempt to read his bible,
or say his prayers, will be the signal for an onslaught of bread crusts and
slippers. True, it may be, and doubtless is, that the man who firmly persists
in the performance of his religious exercises eventually is let alone, nay, is even
respected by his comrades ; but how few possess this moral courage, and how
many sink before the shafts of ridicule. Moreover, let the man fail to maintain
his own standard for a single moment, and the last discomfort will be greater
than the first, and his difficulties in maintaining his position will be im
measurably increased. And, whilst speaking of the religious life, I have found
that one of the greatest annoyances arising from the publicity of barrack life
is difference of belief. Episcopalians, Methodists, Independents, Baptists,
Roman Calholics, are mixed up together, and with men who scoff at them all.
A Roman Catholic has no opportunity of performing his religious exercises, and
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
19
into shamelessness hard as steel the womanhoods of its
*
base episcopate; and in so far as it scares prostitution
away, it must drive the foul soldiery in upon our houses;
because the fortnightly ripping open of the moral sore and
sewer is an outrage upon the community, and a day of
sour shame and filthy jeering to the thoughtless crowd;
because it embrutes the sacred medical office, and pays it
for pretending to give away the power of sin and wicked
ness ; and because it is the germ of a system which would
debauch and infect the general public. I object to it also
because it sullies the Government of the country with the
responsibility of finding clean prostitutes for the army, and
spends governmental action upon the diseases of one vice,
which itself is but a disease of the hopelessness and drunk
enness which the present Government army system perwhen in a barrack-room with Protestants his position is often most uncomfortable.
A sergeant informed me that, night after night, there used to be controversies
in his room, lasting through half the night, and terminating, not unfrequently,
in blows. He said officers had no conception of the religious quarrels which
ensued, since they were hushed in a moment if an officer came in.
“ Nor is it possible to get a good night’s rest. Out of so many men some
are sure to be noisy and sleepless; and scarcely is the room quiet when some
drunken or noisy person comes in from leave, disturbing all the sleepers. It
not unfrequently happens also, that some one is ill, either from his own fault or
otherwise, and the atmosphere is rendered unbearable by the occurrences
which unavoidably take place. Nor is the urine tub, which appears to be
considered as the only practicable institution of this nature, conducive to the
comfort of the men. If placed inside the room it is most offensive, and is
occasionally used for most improper and disgusting purposes, and if outside the
door, although less objectionable, it‘is often knocked over by the men who
enter in the dark, and the use of it involves the disturbance of all the sleepers
by the opening and shutting of the door. Another objection to a large barrack
room is the impossibility of warming all alike. One fire is quite insufficient for
twenty-five men. Those placed near it are too hot, those at a distance too
cold. This difficulty can only be overcome economically by having a com
bination of fires and hot water pipes; the fires being central, so that the
soldiers may sit around them.”
* Our lady holds that periodical examination by surgeons does not deaden
but increases honest shame; that the violet, modesty, might even root it
were good at least, she thinks, if it did root—on the hot cinder-hills of lust
with the wind of publicity blowing over them. Who else in the world thinks
this ? Or how could such lack of sympathetic knowledge in a woman exist
exoept by royal charter.
�20
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
petuates in the land and in the regiment. I object to it
in the interest of the bad women, whose persons are
violated fortnightly by State interference, and who are
unjustly selected as the mark for medical legislation, while
the corresponding class, the male whores, whose barracks
are the obverse brothels, are left free to emit infection.
And I recall finally that all this comes of taking not the
opinion of “ experts,” but their domination, and of allowing
them to build place, and power, and pelf, where the most
sacred liberties have dwelt, and where the governing will
of the country, founded on the common sense of plain
men, has been hitherto exercised in the righteousness of a
large impartiality.
Only one condition should justify these acts of a despair
ing and witless legislature: the universal female and male
suffrage of the towns and the large surrounding districts
concerned; a majority of 99 hundredths of the population en
dorsing the inspection under much restriction, which would
leave the prostitute population alone against the commu
nity. And even then the commune should give them the
option of handsomely assisted emigration to some of those
new lands where women are wanted. That would have
some fairness in it. And the vote universal which settles
this, including the prostitute vote, should be taken every
three months, that the working of the base, unhoping, un
curing system might be watched and worried continually ;
and that no settlement and medical plant might grow out
of such a polluted pot. And such examination, for sack
cloths’ sake and ashes’ sake,—for we are all “ fallen,” and
the state and the church are prostitute here in their inward
minds more than the street-walker,—should be transacted
in the cathedral or principal church of the district, except in
cases where the whole of its clergy have petitioned govern
ment weekly for the repeal of the act; and in case of such
petitioning, the examination should be done in the officers’
head quarters ; if in London, in Westminster Abbey, in the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
21
Houses of Parliament, or the Horse Guards; and the
state surgeons should moreover be attended, for indignant
human nature’s sake, by a stout Vigilance Committee of
self sacrificing women, of pure martyr women, chosen by
universal female vote; and this stout Vigilance Committee
should assess drumhead damages for any injury done
by steel or forcings on the examined bodies. Woman
will so be some safeguard to woman. But as at present
administered, the Act is an unrestricted and condoned
male handling by a small household hard-handed minority,
who have no charter but force, of the secret woes of
human nature, selected promiscuously from many woes;
and the sense of the women of the country upon it is
utterly ignored and despised. I am not a jurist, but I
know by heart that there are rights of the person which
precede and tower over the church and the state ; and
that the parliament which breaks them, is out of all law,
and openly invokes on both sides might against right; and
in so far, proclaims the dissolution of society.
Passing now from the patronage which chartered me
dicine gives to one virus, and the public war which it
moves the State to wage upon another virus, I arraign
its mental sanity in the case of the Welsh Fasting Girl.
Here it undertakes by self elected dictatorship to lay
down the final laws of physiology and psychology; to fix
what is possible, and what impossible, in the period of
abstinence from food ; and to rule the press and the people
by its own sick experiences. It undertakes to immure
the people of these islands in its own narrow materialism.
On this I shall not dwell now, having already shewn in
my brother’s pamphlet on the subject, that old physic has
*
no special lights here, and has very special prejudices and
limitations; and is the worst judge of al!, while common
* The Cases of the Welsh Fasting Girl and her Father, by W. M. Wilkinson ;
with Supplementary Remarks, by J. J. Garth Wilkinson. J. Burns, 15
Southampton Row, 1870.
�22
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
experience interpreted by open common sense is the best.
But I will notice, that this arrogance of chartered medi
cine has been displayed on various other subjects ever since
I entered the profession. When Mesmerism came up,
and nobody knew anything about it, and a few wished to
learn something by experiment, chartered physic appeared
upon every mesmeric scene, and attempted by violence to
foreclose the experiments. It swooped with a royal patent
swoop down upon the people who were investigating;
it knew that the whole exhibition was humbug and im
posture ; and it comported itself with an enormity of con
ceited ignorance such as no one can command or contain
unless he has a permanent conceit pipe running into
him directly from a royal college. And yet, reader, the
subject was new: these little men knew nothing about it
but that they hated it; and they hated it because it en
larged the domain of physiology and psychology beyond
their possession; and their possession was narrow, their
heart was narrow, and their mind was narrow, and their
spirit was not, because their calling was no creation of
God, but a manufacture of state colleges.
*
Oh ! but they ought to pray to be drawn up from this
* On the theoretical side, of science and free thought, Lord Bacon saw
clearly the dwarfing of mankind produced by colleges and academic institutions.
I do not know whether his great perceptive observation was ever directed to
the practical working of the same, or to the public conceit and attempted
despotism which the dwarfs would inevitably seek to exercise over peoples in
the last and expiring days of institutional rule. But what Lord Bacon says is
well worth reading still :—“ And he thought this, that in the customs and
institutes of Academies, Colleges, and similar bodies of men, which are designed
for the assemblage and co-operation of the learned, all the elements are found
which are adverse to the ulterior progress of the sciences. For in the main,
the resort is first professorial, and next for honour and reward. The lectures
and exercises are so managed, that it is not easy for anything different from
routine to get into anybody’s mind. And if it happens to any to use liberty of
enquiry and of judgment, he will at once feel himself dwelling in a mighty
solitude.
*
*
*
In the arts and sciences, as in the shafts of metal
mines, all parts should resound with new works and advancing pickaxes.
And in right reason this is so. But in life it has seemed to him, that the polity
and administration of learning which are in vogue, press and imprison most
cruelly the fertility and development of the sciences.”— Coaitata et Visa.
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
23
poisonous well of establishment and patronage, at the
bottom of which, not for truth, they are lying.
And yet, as is always the case with the eaters and
drinkers of evil, they want more of it. They are now
moving Sir John Gray and Mr. Graves to pass a bill to
“ establish one uniform and practical test of efficiency for
all medical practitioners in the United Kingdom,” in order
that “ patients may be enabled readily to distinguish
between qualified and unqualified practitioners.” Uniform
and practical! The pope’s triple hat and Garibaldi’s red
shirt worn by one sentence; high priests and pharisees,
and Lord Christ, at one table. Procrustes cut off heads
and feet, certainly for uniformity, but he did not pretend
to increase either the practicality, or efficiency of his
graduates; or to make their qualifications more dis
tinguishable by an ignorant public. His simple object was
to make men of all sizes fit his bed. The game of life
and death, the grappling with diseases, the cheering of
lengthened sickness, the calm confronting of pestilence,
the promulgation of sanitary rules to sweeten homes and
villages and towns, the private and the public healing,
seem to me to depend all upon the love and life and spirit
and fearless mind of the healers: the education, at this
stage of the world’s books and scientific accomplishments,
is a thing that can be got anywhere; provided you do
not kill the life, by fixing and instituting and endowing
and chartering and deadening the education ; or to sum
up all, by legislating it uniform.
*
And the public has no
difficulty excepting what one uniform diploma and brass
* The following sentences are by one of the greatest men of modern science:
“ Why do candid physicians every now and then astonish casual hearers by a
hint of the very small progress which therapeutics have made since the days of
Calen ? Why does poor little Medicine, stunted and wizened, cast so wistful
an eye at the strong limbs and bouncing proportions of cousin Chemistry ?
Simply because the unhappy child has been brought up on little but main
tenance of truth, while her relative, lucky in not being committed to the care
of royal colleges, has been brought up on progress of science. Go for progress,
and let truth maintain herself.”
�24
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
plate creates and throws in its way, in discerning between
qualified and unqualified practitioners : every neighbour
hood knows its own men; but then the real qualification
lies in the fact that a medical man known otherwise as a
worthy citizen, cures many people, and can probably cure
me, and certainly will if he can : there is no other qualified
practitioner than this; the school gives the schooling, and
certificates the school-success; but the man’s townsmen
give him the seal of qualification.
The struggle for this uniformity where all diversity
would be more to the purpose, because more living, is
another step in the medical plant for power; another
stride into the state ; and another cogent reason for the
dischartering of all medical corporations. If the uni
formity is gained, the people under its regiments will
have a stupider set of men to doctor them for another
quarter of a generation.
I shall now notice one or two reasons alleged in favour
of medical protection, which are not perhaps touched upon
in the following pages. One is, that medical men are so
received in families, are so deeply entrusted, and so re
sponsible, that unless they are good by Act of Parliament
they cannot be up to the mark of their high calling. This
I confess had not occurred to me until I read it in The
Times of last Saturday (art. Medical Education). It would
be a reason for incorporating under the state all catholic
priests, dissenting Ministers, and in general everybody
who has any work of honesty to do for other people. But
the endowment and establishment of everybody is not
likely to be carried in these ways. The other reason was,
that sanitary work, belonging to the public sphere of
action, and comprising towns and districts in its design,
can be carried on only by public medical officers, who can
come only out of royal colleges, which can be created only
by the State. In the first place, this department belongs
more properly to surveyors and engineers; though the
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
25
occasion of it may now and then be suggested by medical
men. But any one with a nose and eyes can generally
tell whether the house-drains, and the drainage of the
neighbourhood are efficient; and where the outward
senses are not enough, other experts, chemists, and not
practising medical men, are usually called in.
In all
general sanitary improvements, engineering talent em
ployed by the municipality through a Board of Works,
is the agent; and medical opinion is for the most part
nothing in regard to such large and obvious uses. It is
but one little nose, and often not the keenest or most
interested nose, among tens of thousands of noses.
These reasons for medical protection are therefore no
reasons, but the animus which they show in the direction
of getting into official place and power by means of fresh
and more centralized chartering, is again another reason for
severing medicine from the State.
If old physic gained nothing from the change but
good manners, the benefit to itself would be great. At
present, all who dissent from it are quacks and impostors;
or as one good man said of homoeopaths, either fools or
knaves. All who die away from it are victims ; and those
who die (the “ peculiar people ”) refusing medical advice,
lay-expectants, we may call them, must be opened after
death by a regular practitioner, who has to decide if they
would have died had they had proper attention and
medicine from old physic.
One would have thought that
the revelations of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, of out
patients treated each in a consultation of 35 seconds, and
then drugged out of one of six bottles, would have kept
down the crest of pride and self applause from the
medical head centres. That such blatant scandals have
not had any effect of the kind, is a proof that the pride
lies deeper than, and out of, the very worthy men who are
so disfigured by it: and I beg to suggest again and again,
that their unhappy inflation, and proved public inefficacity,
�26
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
are due to their royal laurels, which poison their humane
minds, while they seem to decorate their worldly persons.
The present Government, like its predecessors, is not
distinguished for consistency of legislation. Its chieftain,
the most able actuary and accountant mind for assessing
and winding up the failing estates of our societies, that we
have had for centuries ; who knows well how many shillings
in the pound a bankrupt church can pay to its creditors ;
and who apparently can wind up anything, and bring out
comfortable figures ; that great appraising mind has leisure
to write Ecce Homo, Autobiography, and Juventus Mundi,
in addition to the particulars of the numerous State
properties which he is bringing to the hammer. I wish he
would rather spend his leisure in codifying in some manner
the various subjects which all belong under the class of
freedom, free trade, and free competition. I wish he would
hold councils to look all round, and see how many things
the Government can let alone with clearance to itself, and
with advantage to the public. He might draw up for
the guidance of Parliament a schedule of subjects with
which his Government will not meddle, and the control of
which he expressly repudiates. For it is a disgrace to the
mind of a party that they should be increasing freedom of
competition in some departments, and increasing bureau
cracy in others; that they should stand upon the platform
of civil and religious liberty with one foot, and upon that
of medical despotism with the other: that they should
foster all denominations in civil education, and lend their
aid to extinguish all but one denomination in medical
education : that they should leave the bread of the body
free, and let the nation draw upon the fields and granaries
of the whole world for it; and yet confine the growth and
supply of the bread of healing to the sterile field of one
small artificial corporation, where it might be brought
from all ranks and classes, from all men and women, and
the manifold famines of now incurable things be fed into
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
27
health by it. If our great appraiser does not move in this
direction, I shall be forced to think that he has ulterior
objects ; that he is about thoroughly to endow and establish
poor old physic, in order to purchase, I will not say plunder
it at last; and that when it is bureaucratized from top to
bottom, and all colleges are compact as jails, with one big
donjon over all, and the appraiser in the very midst,—
Mark that, old physic ! the appraiser in the midst!—and
the whole profession rigidly fixed in place and power, and
planted like iron upon towns and villages and rustic disstricts, just when that whole profession says, I am all
official and everlasting now, he will step up and say:
“ Gentlemen, you are sold; the State buys you out: you
“ can stay where you are if you like, by paying such or
“ such a per centage, or by purchasing the goodwill of
“ your own practice,—my practice, I mean,—for so many
“ years; but failing this, as your position is an official one,
“ I shall at once appoint your successor, who will comply
“ with ray conditions. In the eye of the State, and in the
“ millennium of Sir John Gray’s uniformity, one medical
“ man is as good as another: they all come from the State
“ brass plate office ; and the public will be satisfied with
“ any change which includes no variety; for I shall be
“ able to remit public taxation out of the annual millions
“ which accrue from my general practice.” Depend upon
it the great appraiser is going to say this, and Sir John
Gray is preparing it: and other callings and professions
may expect to be sold in their turn. This is indeed a
reason why old physic should throw Sir John Gray over
board as soon as ever they can get a cork jacket on him ;
and pray to be dischartered, disendowed, disestablished,
disroyalized, and to have anything on earth done with
them which will take away the great appraiser’s pretext
for buying them at his own probably very low valuation.
The reader will notice that over and over again I have
returned to the assertion that compulsory bills would not
�28
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
have come from Parliament unless privileged medical cor
porations had possessed it. This by no means implies that
the body of the profession is in favour of these Acts : the
crowned head of the profession, perverted by alliance with
the State, acts without caring about the body, and per
suades the State to follow it. The opposite counsels to
these, lie in the absorption of medical sense in common
sense, thereby raising both into powers serviceable to the
community ; not in the calling in of heterodox instead of
orthodox physicians, for then still you would be in the
hands of specialists, and often of very exacting and narrow
specialists, but in the calling in of the nation, which at
present cannot get near to its life, because all the pro
fessionals and experts have closed round that life, and
monopolized it. “ Come let us reason together,” is the
voice of justice on both sides in all propositions affect
ing the people. Whatever clique hinders this, must be
cast out. But this “ reasoning together ” means universal
suffrage, for what else can it mean ? We are living in
great problems of freedom and compulsion ; and we are
bound to reconcile between those opposite ends. Their
meeting point lies in the coming up of the national free
will, which can compel a free nation, as a man’s free will
compels a man, though nothing less than this self com
pulsion can rightfully compel it. The voice of that national
free will is mere universal suffrage. We have a right to
anticipate what the verdict and execution of that suffrage
would be upon these Compulsory Acts ; we know that
they could not subsist one day in any municipality under
that suffrage; we know that that suffrage would not hold
any parley as the Government has done, with these schemes
of chartered physic. As I said before, the absorption of
all professionals into the general voice, and the issue of
measures from none but the chieftains of that voice, are
the only solvent of the case.
My present word is done, though I hope to come forth
�A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
29
again soon on the greater subject of The Commonwealth and
the Godwealth. For thirty years I have been actively con
vinced of the inestimable benefits to be derived from
medical freedom. The results of all legislation towards
freedom during that time have deepened my conviction.
Many years ago I translated Swedenborg’s Animal King
dom, a work in which a free layman demonstrated by light
and life that the psychology and physiology of the body of
man are opened up by God to free thought where they are
closed against professional thought. Next I wrote a tract
on the subject of Unlicensed Medicine After that, a little
work called The Ministry of Health. And lastly, the pages
which now succeed under the special name of Medical
Freedom. As I have said at the beginning of these
remarks, the Medical Freedom was designed to show that
medicine would gain everything by being moveable in
itself, and distant from the State ; by being independent,
and internally various and competitive: in short that
medicine ought to stand clear of Government. Otherwise,
uniformity, livery, dwarfing, arrogance, and contempt of
the laws and light of nature and revelation; in short, social
and scientific materialism. And now I have completed
the globe of fact, and given two hemispheres to this free
dom, in demonstrating that the State and the Government
ought to be quite free from and independent of medicine.
Otherwise the legislative and executive will both be played
upon by the perpetual opinions of “experts;” the rule of
philosophers and scientific men will be forced upon the
bodies of Englishmen ; and the Government will be hated
and despised for essaying to carry out greedy theories and
experiments upon the whole people; and for creating an
official army of apothecaries to superintend the costly vio
lation. The latter half of the proof has been in part
practically furnished by the two heinous Acts of Parlia
ment, the Compulsory Vaccination Act, and the Compulsory
Prostitutes Examination Act; two pestilent diseases in the
�30
A FREE STATE AND FREE MEDICINE.
State which it owes to its unloyal yokefellow, chartered
physic.
I owe it now to all my medical brothers and sisters to
say, that though I have spoken hardly of their corporations
as they at present stand, I desire to speak and think
reverently and lovingly of themselves. For I am one of
them, on board their own boat. I am an old medical
practitioner, forty years at the work; I delight in the
calling, and honour it; and hope to die in the life giving
harness of it. And especially do I desire to see us all more
free and open in our hearts and minds; less fearful and
less unbelieving ; looking less to the past, than to God and
the future ; and praying for His inspirations, while we scan
*
all nature and art and books for His instructions. And I
have learnt very deeply from no man, that the way to
advance to all this is by going out of royal swaddling
clothes, and under heaven winning for ourselves freedom
of medicine in the greater freedom of our country.
�II.
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
It is my intention from time to time to offer cases with
remarks, as an easy means of bringing new treatment
and occasional thoughts before the public.
The time is to come when general medical education
will surround my profession so closely, that its narrow
ness and exclusiveness, and its cliques, will give way
under the pressure of the public common sense; and no
authority will be left but the authority of facts. I
have a great hope in me to hasten that desirable time.
For it is evident that the simpler medical truth can
become—by medical truth understand truth in practice,
the only test of which is, success in practice—the more
must enlightened public criticism come upon the doctors,
and give them their qualification in every separate case. A
man’s or a woman’s repute will be his or her sole
authorization to practice. For instance, in the treatment
of small-pox as I have now made it public, any mother
or grandmother may demand the remedies which ensure
the benefits recorded in my book, and if the doctor is not
acquainted wth them, and will not employ them when
pointed out, then such mother or grandmother can take
away his diploma in the case, and either confer it upon
herself, or provisionally upon any other person whom she
may appoint to conduct the precious interests of the family
health. There can be no wise authority beyond her, or
above her.
For competition will be the soul of success here, as it is in
�32
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
every other case. Given any field of nature or experience
to be explored, and all the faculties of man are wanted
for it; all the chances of birth are wanted for it; all the
gifts of God are wanted for it; all the developments of time
are wanted for it; all the freedom of society is wanted for
it; all absence of fear of man, and fear for position, is
wanted for it; all good genius and good ambition is wanted
for it; in short, numberless men are wanted, each mind of
them free, and original, and inspired, as if there was
nobody else in the world; yet each instructed in his lower
walks by the labours of the rest; and all animated by a
common faith in the inevitable co-operation of good with
good, and the inevitable consentaneousness of knowledge
with knowledge, though independence and freedom be
the only law and bond for each.
Free societies, free institutions will necessarily arise out
of this new medical humanity: order most punctilious and
most exacting will arise; but freedom will be the king upon
its throne.
But now we see the reverse of this, and health contracted
and eclipsed in the prisons of medical establishment.
The maintenance of this present condition lies in the
Protection of Physic by the State. Continue this, and an
external and well-nigh irresistible aid is afforded to the
existing general condition of medical art and science, as
against anything which would considerably enlarge it; still
more, which would revolutionize it ever so benignly; and,
most of all, against anything which tends even remotely to de
professionalize it, publicize it, and humanize it. Continue this,
and an art and science which depend upon the natural truths
of God, the capacities of nature, and the genius of mankind,
and which should be nourished most intimately of all on the
One Exemplar of Revelation, and the fact of Redemption—
that art and science are commanded to eat the dry crusts of
Parliament, instead of the manna of heaven and the bread
of the earth; and lawyers and the magistracy stand with a
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
33
ferule of penalties to rap the knuckles and break the explor
ing fingers of discoverers who dare to discover out of
accord with colleges, or who dare to discover at all if they
are not cloister-vowed, and cloister-bred. Out upon such
public insanity. Any other art, similarly narrowed, would
be similarly strangled. Engineering or chemistry, in their
existing condition in April, 1864, protected—or what is
the same thing—arrested by the State, would stiffen into
Chinese imitation, and their soul, which is invention,
would be lost; their worldly motive, which is ambition,
unbounded by other men’s power, would be lost; and their
huge sense of freedom, in which they live and move and
have their being, would be exchanged for the degrading
consciousness of the powdered head and well-fitted livery of
the kitchen of the State.
But medicine must be emancipated, and as the public,
directed by God, will have to do the work, I address my
medical life and thought to the public; and not specially
to the people in bonds.
Yet would I willingly calm the apprehensions of all
professional brethren.
1. Not a college, sect, or diploma will perish when
physic is free from State patronage and protection; that
is to say, unless public bodies choose to disband themselves.
The only power they will lose will be the power of
harming other bodies, or other people not of their way
of thinking. They will gain the power of emulating in
good works and open-mindedness all the useful people
whom they have called quacks, and imposters, and un
qualified practitioners, and who have been the moving
wheels of practice in all ages of the world. They will
gain the humanity of learning from the dog, when he
cures himself with grass, without practising the now
ordinary ingratitude and inhumanity of kicking the dog
that is their teacher.
They will sympathizingly learn
from the North American Indian, and the poor Hindoo,
c
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
the traditional healing virtues they have known since the
earliest ages; and their own old pharmacopeias will be
enriched, not then without acknowledgment, with the
sweet beginnings of simplicity, of nature, and of health.
Nay, the certainty is, that the existing colleges, owing
to the decrepitude of the public mind, always induced
by being protected, will be too enduring.
2. In the new time coming, when Parliament will no
longer prescribe a medical profession, and force the
British people to take the dose, the public will be more
apt than they are now to send for regular and collegesanctioned practitioners; provided the colleges give them
selves no airs, but compete fairly in the medical race.
For the colleges have the start and can enter the
course with many chances of success; provided, again, they
can take to their hearts the new fact of freedom, and love it
as they ought.
At all events we may say it will be their own fault if
they are not the chief ministers at the public bedside.
This, however, will again depend upon the progress of
the art of healing; and institutionally upon other colleges
quite diverse from themselves coming upon the scene, to
enrich medicine, enflame competition and emulation, and
extend the boundaries of that large kind feeling which alone
can melt away professional jealously, and which is the only
climate in which all that is liberal and humane can live.
But would I commit the lives of the community to the
possible intervention of uneducated men ? That, I answer,
is the very thing which has taken place at present, and
which I would invoke freedom to help me to avoid. The
education of the schools cannot fit men for curing the
diseases of their fellows; it is only one way of launching
them towards professional, but not necessarily, healing
life. A man of no Latin, no anatomy, no physiology, is
every now and then a good physician, though he sits on the
lowest forms of society. He is educated for that use,
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85
though he cannot write his own name. By freedom, bring
him into rapport with the light of learning, if you can; but
at all events kill not the Divine power which is in him of
doing good, because he is not educated up to your bench.
Perhaps you are confounding education, which is the
accepted art of making gentlemen, with that grander
education, or leading forth, which every man can have,
and which consists in giving him freedom and a career,
that his orginal gifts may be led forth by their own way and
his own way, into each one’s promised land of a useful and
associated life. To confound these two educations were a
mistake; for the great physician, look you, may come in a
beggar’s guise. There are no uneducated men save the
men that cannot do their life-work. Their success in that
gives them their diploma of knowledge every day. And
no college can take it away from them. And none ought
to have the power of obscuring it, by insisting that it shall
be pasted over with an artificial document of State paper.
Want of skill and want of care in medical practice
amount to so much unjustified death per annum; but
who supposes that state protection of physic can in
crease the amount of skill in the medical community ? The
State, it is true, can exact from everyone, that he or
she shall pass through a curriculum of preparatory studies
and hospital attendance, to fit him to enter upon practice.
But of the studies, many may be useless, except as
accomplishments. From the studies, many useful ones
may be left out, owing to the bigotry of the elders. The
diploma may be sought as the shield of protection to the
doctor rather than as the shield of health to the patient.
Numerous men naturally qualified for medicine, born
doctors, may be, and are, shut out from their life-work,
by the expense which confines the practice of physic to
the abler classes. All the State licentiates leaning upon
their diplomas, are apt from the very security of their
position to be mastered by a conceit in which natural
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
skill must languish. To be built up against freedom, to
be privileged, is to be built up against nature ; and gifts
of God, which in this case are given first in the heart,
will be small where the receivers of them deny the exer
cise of them to their fellows. To be inhumane to your
brother man, to be chartered against him, is a bad pre
paration for ministering to the sick, or the departing.
The root and basis of medicine is the love of healing in
the universal heart and mind; the stem of it is the in
stinctive perception and light which is born to penetrate
into health and disease; the branches, and the twigs and
the leaves of it are the specialities of perceptions from the
nature and the spirit of mankind; which become special
in the course of experience; the love of healing reigning
and animating in every one of them. Mere experience in
its widest range is the soil the tree grows in, and the
climate in which it lives. You may garden, you may deepen,
you may purify and enrich this experience as you like; but
the tree grows through all the world, and sciences, and
societies, and states have nothing to do but first not to
define it, not to hinder it; and second, to help it if they
can.
If it wants pruning, the force of public opinion
and public criticism, and the pressure of public safety,
are the only instruments that can lop its sacred life; and
all these will play an immeasurably greater part when
State patronage has passed away.
And now suppose you had broken your leg, and it was
badly managed by a regular doctor, a surgeon by Act of
Parliament; and that I had broken my leg, and it was
badly set by an unlicensed bonesetter; would not your
bad man, in an action at law, be far more likely to escape
from you scot free than my bad man? You know he
would; because he would be in the fortress of legality in
the first place; and because he belongs to a powerful
clique which will gather round his incapacity, and stand
up and speak for him; and unless it be a very gross case,
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
37
say they could have done no better, and that his ante
cedents are perfect. The pressure of public safety towards
each individual is therefore greatly diminished by official
izing a medical profession; thus causing them all,
army-wise, to support each other, and giving them official
irresponsibility toward the suffering and the sick. And
if you could take away bonesetters and quacks altogether,
the medical profession would be utterly uncriticised and
unamenable. We may sum up this branch of the subject
with the axiom, that the more medicine is under the
protection of the State, the less can its practice be subject
to public opinion, or be under the correction of the law.
An impression has been sedulously culivated, that
anatomy and physiology, pathology, and various other
branches of science, are the healing virtue in the world,
and that they, and written Practice of Medicine, con
stitute positive faculties in man; whereas they are mere
books, or at the best outlying experiences. Not one of
them has any direct relation, any ride of thumb, to a single
case that will hereafter occur. In every instance they
require to pass through a living medical perception to
be of any use. That perception and all that belongs
to it, is, as I have said before, a spiritual thing, and
must only be fed, but not substituted or overlaid, by
knowledge. It is an appetite for doing good and
working cures, and experience and knowledge must
feed it; and this must take place upon true social con
ditions ; that is to say, all the men who belong natu
rally to the calling, must be encouraged by the absence of
State interference, to take their places at the Board of
Healing.
For, mark you, all science and experience depend for
their cultivation upon numbers of the right men: so many
earnest men to the square mile of medical truth, and
you will have greater crops of knowledge than if only
half the number were employed. And if you take away
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
protection from this medical corn of humanity, you will
have more colleges to grow it; waste lands of many
minds, never cultivated before, sown with it; more
sciences, more extensive anatomy, physiology, pathology,
pharmacy, rising up from the new interest and curiosity
of the enfranchised medical masses; a greater closeness
of these sciences to the matter in hand; and a quantity of
non-medical minds, who have been forced by mere birth,
parentage, and genteel education, against their grain, into
the cultivation of healing, will be unable to stand the
natural rivalry of born doctors of all classes, and will
betake themselves to other callings. In the meantime,
there will not be more medical men, unless society re
quires them, but there will be a constant tendency ever
increasing, that there shall be none but truly medical men
associated with the medical wants of the people.
This flush and influx of spirit and nature into the call
ing, will greatly—nay, incalculably—alter the spirituality
and naturalness of the art and its ancillary sciences. Much
will then be able to be done by genius and instinct, which
is now only vainly attempted by the cruel senility of an
effete profession. For the matter stands thus:—Nature
and its sciences must be cultivated, according to the
present exigency and mission of the human mind ; for these
are the natural and scientific ages. Medicine must be
extended, falsely or benignly, from the pressure of the sick
upon the sound. The world of work revolving with giddy
velocity, brain and heart, and man and woman, call aloud
for central power to enable us to stand upright in the
rapid revolutions. If the medical faculty — I mean the
cohort of healers out of all men—is only one-tenth nature’s
strength, and nine-tenths noodledom from one class only,
the one-tenth must cast about savagely, and most arti
ficially, for the missing nine-tenths of their natural mind
and their natural array. Failing to combat disease on
such unequal terms, they must endeavour to generate
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
39
power, which is another name for inspiration, instinct, and
genius, out of mere sciences ; and these very sciences per
petually disappointing them they must necessarily cudgel
until there is nothing left but analysis and detail. Woe
then to the bedside when knowledge itself is dust and
ashes; and woe to nature and her feelings when the rack
and the thumbscrew are applied as the only known means
of eliciting her loving, and on any terms but love’s, impe
netrable secrets.
All this has gone on in our time and for ages past, but
now to clear understanding. If the medical calling had
been true to nature, and to human nature, in which free
dom and the order that springs from freedom are abiding
facts, the monstrosity of vivisection, of cutting up live
animals, never could have been thought to be a means to
the healing art. The great gorilla of cruelty could never
have been regarded as an ally of the Great Physician.
Perception, instinct, genius, the inspiration of Christianity,
which by making men love each other is the heart and soul
of all human arts, would have had it given to them to heal
diseases without the need of any suggestion from a torture
in which the demons must rejoice. It would have been
seen at once that to lay one knife edge upon a living
creature was to cut the supreme nerve that carries the
emotion of humanity right out from religion into the
medical mind. It would have been known instinctively
that the power of healing, coming as it should do from
Christ direct, is from that moment paralytic; that the
steady will can no longer lift it, and that the good it still
does is in momentary spasms from the lower emotions of
the man. How different from the river of power, pro
ceeding down the Divine steeps, terrace by terrace, to
humanity at large, through faculties which are essentially
humane.
And this horrible vivisection is a type of the other
distorting arts and sciences which the false cramping of
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
medicine into a State-built profession is one active means
of producing.
Chemic, static, and material reasoning
have as little to do with restoration of health as physiology
founded upon the cutting up of living animals. Observe,
I do not deny that vivisection may, as other analytic
methods have done, contribute hints, in the ages while
man is still cruel to man, to practical medicine; but I
deny our right, even with chloroform to stupify animals,
to gain knowledge in this way. There are robberies and
murders in nature, and science has no more right to live
upon their spoils, than citizens have right to retire into
comfortable drawing-rooms for life upon the proceeds of
daggers and dark lanes. There are better riches for man
and science than these, and immeasurably better ways of
acquiring them. Time was when the cutting up of living
criminals did contribute to the progress of physiological
knowledge. There is no doubt of that; but even Dr.
Brown-Sequard would scarcely advocate the practice as
legitimate at the present day. And now the feelings of
every one of his cats and his crows is worth more than all
the science which their maltreatment has ever brought
into his store.
Before quitting this branch of the subject, let us notice
that the State also lends a heavy pressure to discourage
the introduction of women as medical practitioners. This
it does by chartering irresponsible public bodies, such as
the colleges of physicians and surgeons, who deny the
right of examination to women, however gifted or accom
plished they may be; and these brave women, few at
present in numbers, and with no public support, are
obliged to submit without appeal to this corporate des
potism which has grasped the keys of the door of medical
practice. Surely here, as in all other human things, the
law is freedom and experiment. If woman aspires to try
her hand in healing the sick, what is the justification of
that power which would deny her the trial? You think
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
41
she had better mind her own business, and attend to her
house and its concerns; but why then do you not mind
yours, and leave her to herself? If she has not tried the
medical life, how is it possible to know what will come of
her trial? You cannot penetrate a chemical, or a fact in
anything, by thinking; you must have experiment, which
has made all the difference between the dark ages of
knowledge and the light ages. Especially in human capa
cities you must have experiment: and without freedom,
which State patronage inevitably destroys; you cannot have
experiment. True, woman may be altogether unfit for
this work, but let her try, which is the one only way to prove
her unfitness. Do not with your State sword of ungal
lantry cut her down in her first exercises, because you
think she ought not to succeed. I do not know whether
she will succeed or not, and that is clearly no affair of
mine; but J do know that if I deny her the right to her
experiment, besides being guilty of the most cowardly
meanness and unmanliness, I am denying in the highest
instance the divinely ordained and only successful principle
of all the arts and sciences — I am crushing the very
masterpiece of experiment.
In short, medical social science reposes on the ground
of medical social experiment, just as natural science reposes
upon the ground of natural experiment.
Instead then of cutting up living animals, favour by free
dom the putting together of living humanities; favour
in this way at once the highest synthesis and the highest
experiment; and be assured that if no other good comes
from it, disburdened and leisure-gifted human nature will
become the vehicle of a spirit and a fire, of a generosity
and an insight, of a thankfulness and a penetration, of a
love and of a life, before which Isis will let drop her veil,
and the artificial difficulties which have barred and frozen
out the long lost way to the positive ages will be melted
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
from before our advancing feet by the smiles of nature
herself.
Bnt besides excluding without trial one half of the
human race, and perhaps the better half, from the inspired
pursuit of healing, State interference also confines the cul
tivation and practice of medicine virtually to the middle
classes. That is to say, it ordains that the genius of the
physician is only to be found in one rank of society. It
erects a property-qualification for exercising the gifts of
God in the chief of the inspirational arts supported by the
chief of the sciences. Apply this all round, and how
absurd it grins upon us. Imagine that Parliament should
insist that no painter, sculptor, poet, or musician should be
born in the upper or the lower ranks ! What a belief
in caste, and Chinese artificiality would this imply; and
what an atheistic denial of gifts, of genius, and of the
mission of Nature’s noblemen, wherever they may be.
And yet Parliament, without intending it, virtually does
all this for the medical estate, by interfering to give privi
lege to colleges of the middle class, which thenceforth
inevitably proceed by financial arrangements, and enforced
studies, to make a man first a gentleman in accomplish
ments, and afterwards to let him be a medical man if his
gifts lie that way; and to dub him so in any case. This,
too, is against social experiment, and affronts nature in her
scientific regard. It is the great source of quacks among
the poorer classes ; the said quacks being evidently persons
with some gift for medicine, but with no means of an
education.
Emancipate medicine from State-trammels,
and poor men’s medical colleges would arise, and compete
not ignobly with the other colleges. The poor could then
be attended by educated people of their own sort, at small
expense, and the masses generally would be raised by
having their own unscorned natural professions, and a new
class of bluff honest common senses and artisan ways of
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
43
natural life and thought would be added to these noble
arts. The medical instinct and inspiration of humanity
shall stand upon their feet in the masses.
Nor, then, would medical nature be cashiered, as she
now is, of the splendid culture and chivalric honour and
insight of the upper men and women.
What Lord
Napier was to logarithms; what Lord Rosse is to astrono
mical experiments; what the Duke of Sutherland is to
rescue from fire ; what Wellington was to war; and Prince
Albert to the republicanism of the arts and sciences,
that might other lords and ladies be to practical medicine,
and the inventions which it so much needs. But make
it essentially a middle class affair, and the lower classes
cannot bring their gifts into it, and the upper classes
will not. Yet it is against all reason to suppose that
the noblemen and gentlemen of Great Britain do not
include a per-centage of medically gifted men ; and also
that the same is not true of the people. The fact that
as a rule they yield no recruits to the divine mission of
curing disease, is of itself sufficient to show that some
devouring artificiality is preying upon them; and that a
huge injustice is done to gifts for which we are heavily
responsible before God, and to our fellow men.
The
protection of medicine by the State is that artificiality
and that injustice. Remove it, and with it you begin
to remove the baneful belief—now all but universal—
that medical men can be created by culture; that real
culture can come from without, and that the nature and
gifts of the men are of second-rate importance.
Nay,
in the very act of removing it you reverse that creed,
and make the gifts primary, and set the culture in the
second place.
Will you have less culture for that?
Oh! no, infinitely more! The gifts will become then so
sacred, and the responsibility of them so exacting, that
the sharp and genial powers will raise colleges before
which the existing ones could pass no examination, but
�44
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
great and corporate though they be, would inevitably be
plucked. Where there is a will there is a way. And
the great way is natural knowledge; but the will in
its purest manifestation is only another name for the
determination of our gifts.
And now, to turn the tables, having shown the
blighting and vitiating influence of State patronage upon
medicine, there is another branch of despotism quite
of an internal kind, which deserves to be recorded and
protested against. There is the attempt to subject me
dicine, not to State law, but to scientific law; the aim,
as the phrase goes, to make it into a positive science.
The truth is, as I have stated before, that medicine
is not a science at all, although nourished and fed per
haps out of all sciences; Medicine is an Art, and an
art reposes upon a gift of God, and according to the
intensity of that gift it is called genius, and according to
its native and willing openness to the powers above it
becomes inspiration. And that art summons and em
ploys all the faculties for its furtherance; among them, all
the scientific faculties, and seeks instruction and advance
ment from them all. But because it is an unquestioning
rush of instinctive life from the man into his world and
his calling, it cannot be dominated by any rule or
principle whatever less than the love of medical good,
and subordinate^ and as a means the love of medical
truth. No doctrine or rule must ever be allowed to
invade that centre, any more than the geography of the
earth must be palmed upon the sun. If you attempt
to work it by rule, some one ambitious principle will
extinguish all the much needed others, and you will have
war first, and then inconceivable narrowness in your mind.
You will fall into sects, and at the entrance to each Mrs.
Grundy will stand doorkeeper in your soul. You will
not venture to prescribe what you know would do good,
because it is not of your self-chosen rubric; and because
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
45
your fellows will call you to account for a breach of your
bond. You will cease to look all round for means, and
will wear the blinkers of so-called principle where the
precipices of your own and your neighbour’s danger de
mand the foot of the chamois, and the eye of the eagle.
Heaven help you, you will be accoutred for blindman’s
buff when you ought to be king of the terrible Alps.
And all for what ? that you may pretend to an exactness
which nature disowns; and may enthrone the tiny frame
of material science upon the colossal ruins not only of art,
but of faith.
It cannot be done; there are no positive sciences but
those of man’s own making—the houses which he has
built, and in which therefore he can be supreme—the
rest are all fluctuating, and so full of mystery before
and behind, so meant also for usefulness and not for ab
soluteness, that careful and humble science may indeed be
a positive ship, made in excellent human docks, but
the great, and desiderated, and unattainable knowledge
is the sea itself, and God is in that sea. The bark rocks
and floats, and the further it voyages, and the more it
moves, the less likely is it to founder in the inscrutable
deep. Let it not want to become more positive than
speeding flight can make it; let it not attempt to drop
the anchor of conceit in the unfathomable places. Let it
not dare to say of any spot in the Divine ocean—This
is mine, and here I will abide !
These matters may sound abstract, but they are of
immense practical significance, and play an important
part, for good or for ill, at the bedside. For if you find
a practitioner who has a doctrine which he considers ab
solute, and who derives his art from that doctrine, two
bad consequences will follow. In the first place, he will
set an overweening value upon the science, pure and simple,
of the case he is treating : the exacting doctrine in him
will have an unnatural appetite to be fed out of that
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MEDICAL FREEDOM.
science; and the regard of the cure as an end will be
perpetually confused by the regard of the science as an
end.
I have felt this so strongly myself in practice,
that I have been obliged to put it down: and to tear up
in my mind all magisterial doctrines and principles, and to
rewrite them on neutral and subservient parts of myself
in a humble and ministerial capacity. By this means,
however, I hope I am attaining to a wider as well as
exacter science in the end: a science which radiates from
the conscious intellect of cures. But in the second place
the doctrinaire practitioner will be bound, or greatly
biassed,—by his own mind; by the surveillance of his
doctrinaire patients, whom he has helped to make into
pedants; and by the medical clique to which he belongs—
not to do anything which outlies the doctrine which is
his creator. Suggestions apart from that doctrine will
tend to reduce him to a chaos. What treble fear all this
implies ! What a slender exploration of the means of
nature ! What a regard to a centre of the fancy, when
sad and bleeding facts lie calling for pity, and ought to
avail to take one quite out of oneself, and to make one
gather succour from all things. Instead of this, the first
care is to practice within the doctrine, and to use no
weapon but what the armoury of the doctrine contains.
It is true you may have the highest confidence in the
doctrine, and may believe it is a universal rule, but the
universality is only a belief, and not an established fact;
and no number of human lives can make it more than
a belief; that is to say, a probable, and in the ratio of its
probability, a growing and a useful science. Neverthe
less, you have no right to limit your powers of doing
medical good to such a belief or such a science. Observe,
it is not the science but its mastership that I impugn.
And I do impugn it, because it limits you with no com
pensation ; and because in a vast number of serious cases
it does not succeed; and because where it does succeed,
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
47
you have ever a duty to demand a greater success, in
greater rapidity and perfectness of cure. But here again,
your masterful doctrine tells you that when you have
served it faithfully you have done enough.
It will easily be seen that all this applies with force to
Homoeopathy, a doctrine to which I owe so much; in
which, so far as it goes, I thoroughly believe; and which,
whenever the supreme end of cure and my means of know
ledge allow, I unreservedly practice. I regard Homoeo
pathy as the grandest natural and material feeder which
has yet been laid down by the genius of a man from the
nature of things into the spiritual body of the healing
arts. Yet Homoeopathy is but a doctrine, a science, and
a rule, and I will not derive medicine from a science,
or confound it with a science; on the contrary, the science
of Homoeopathy itself is a beautiful child and derivation
of an advancing medical art. Let it occupy a central,
a solar place in the science of therapeutics by drugs.
There it can subsist. But no man can do good by ig
noring any of the wide realms which lie around it and
beneath it, and which are the domain of the collective
medical mind.
I have been allowed to discover that certain formidable
diseases, small-pox to wit, can be treated tuto, cito et
jucunde, with a safetv, rapidity, and absence of suffering
hitherto unknown, by simple external applications. In
the first place, I had a powerful desire to cure my patients
well, and a dissatisfaction with the present standard of
well, in all schools. This desire in its measure is the
natural heart of healing. Then, in the next process, I
knew that Hydrastis soothes irritated mucous surfaces,
and sometimes skin surfaces, and I thought I would try it
on the face of small-pox. The only science here involved
was an acquaintance with the drug, and a little reasoning
by analogy. I tried it, and it succeeded marvellously.
And since then I have the art of applying it correctly,
�48
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
increased by the experience or knowledge of several cases.
And I have faith and confidence in its being a future
blessing to the public; a saving of innumerable healths,
and faces, and lives.
But where is the positive science in all this ? A little
good knowledge suffices for a great deal of good practice.
It strikes me that I have been as little scientific as a
skilled blacksmith who makes a horse-shoe in a given
number of strokes. Of course he knows what he is about
with great accuracy; but that is all you can say of his
knowledge. The rest is educated instinct, and excellent
smiting. He may read about iron and heat, and the
biceps and triceps muscles of his arm, in over hours ; and
he will better his mind by it, and not hurt his strong
sinews ; but the science of his art must not intrude itself
book-wise into his forge, unless as fuel, or he will soon be
a bad professor and spoil horse’s hoofs.
Take the obverse, and suppose that I had enthroned
the Homceopathic principle above my mind, and that I
had to grapple with dreadful small pox. The exigency
then becomes, to cure with a medicine which will produce
symptoms as nearly similar as possible to those of the
disease. I know no drug which will do this except tartar
emetic in one case which I have seen. I should therefore
have had to cast about through the whole of Pharmacy
for the drug in question; to reason by analogy from small
symptoms to great ones, and perhaps I should have reasoned
wrong; and after all I might never have found what I
wanted. And when I had found it, I should have lacked
precedent for applying it externally. In the meantime,
what patients unrelieved and unsaved might be waiting
at the doors of my positive science before I could throw
them open and invite the sufferers into relief and into
health ! Perforce, I must have hardened and narrowed
and thus satisfied my heart, to let such sad waiting go on.
And at the best where would be the gain to science ?
�MEDICAL FREEDOM.
49
Science is but the register of success ; and 1 should have
had no science of shortening the disease, no science of
curing the disease, no science of anything, but the worst
sort of expectancy; the science of contentment with bad
things, and the science of waiting for science. In the end,
not Homoeopathy, but the small-pox would be my king.
To obviate this I stood upright, as I have been grad
ually for some years now endeavouring to do, and regarded
Homoeopathy, and all other means and pathies whatever,
as my appointed servants, and myself as the servant of
healing. And now I had no jealousies among the servants,
because I gave no privileges to any; and I could pick
and choose from all means, regardless of the overweening
ness of science, of the sectarianism of patients, and of the
despotism of medical cliques. In short, I essayed to be
free in my art; to wait upon Heaven, and to use all
ministers and faculties in their degree of service. Feeling
the blessed power of this position, in contradistinction to
the cramp and weakness of my old one, I am in duty
bound, even against the charge of egotism, to impart it to
my fellow men.
What then, it may be asked, becomes of Homoeopathy ?
I answer that it takes its place exactly according to its
proved services, and stands upon the irremoveable foun
dation of its cures. It will be all that it ever was, the
most suggestive thing in the round of Pharmaceutical
science. Its dogmatism and its hugeness of minutise will
be cashiered, and Homoeopathy will be the stronger for
losing them. It will be girded afresh for a magnificent
servitude to the ends of healing. Its martyrs will still
prove medicines on their own bodies, but with an almost
exclusive attention to cardinal results. Its registers of
symptoms, curtailed by good sense, will be mastered by
those who court intimacy with drugs, and studied con
tinually afresh where the art of the physician requires it.
The only difference will be, that Homoeopathy will become
�50
MEDICAL FREEDOM.
enormously progressive, because it will have no authority
and no privilege, and will be obliged to subsist upon cures.
Reduced, so far as authority goes, to equality with other
medical sciences, it will become primarily ambitious of
suggesting remedies, and cease from provings which leave
out the human memory, and constitute a new matter and
faculty of absolute dust. But it will no more quarrel with
other means than the mariner’s compass quarrels with
the sextant, or the sails with the steam-engine of the ship.
Above all, mere instrument that it is, and mere instrument
that all science is, it will never go mad again, and believe
that it is the captain of the medical crew; for that captain
is the Great Physician Himself, and all His sons and
daughters in the plenary freedom of His art.
�As a record and a protest I here reprint a Letter on
Vivisection, which appeared in the Morning Star of the
20th of August, 1863. See p. 40.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE “STAR.”
Sir,— From my heart, and also from my head, I thank
you for your leading article on Vivisection in to-days
paper.
I hope and trust that through the subject of
vivisection now publicly opened, and the controversy
going on, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals will become affluent enough to have special
correspondents and reporters wherever vivisection is prac
tised under medical sanction. If the horror is to be, let
us know it, and let us judge of it.
If science is to be
born from the throes of animal life, let us also be duly
horrified and agonised, and suffer with the sufferers.
I have long been of Sir Charles Bell’s opinion that
vivisection is a delusion as a means of scientific progress.
Of course its results, like any other set of facts, constitute
a science in themselves ; so do the results of murder,
and so do the results of picking pockets; an exact science,
if you like; and the earlier parts of the science will of
course be subject to correction by the later; and thus
vivisection may show, and has shown, truths and errors in
the special walk of vivisection. The science of animal
agonies, like all sciences, can be corrected, eliminated, and
completed by experiments of fresh and ever-fresh agonies.
But it has been a mistake to suppose that we were in the
path of the humane sciences — in natural physiology,
natural symtomatology, or within millions of leagues of
medicine, when with rack and thumbscrew and all torture
we were the inquisitors of the secrets of animal life.
Under such circumstances nature is inevitably a liar, and
an accomplice of the Father of Lies. I know that her,
�52
VIVISECTION.
and his, very lies are a science ; but then they are not the
science we take them for, nor the science we want. They
are not mind-expanding, heart-softening, or health-con
ferring science.
Vivisectional anatomy has contributed to medicine—
meaning by medicine the healing of diseases—virtually
nothing, but false paths and wrong roads.
Morbid
anatomy has contributed marvellously little. Anatomy
has done far less than is supposed, though it keeps the
eyes of the physician’s imagination open, and enables him
to tally conditions and symptoms somewhat with parts and
organic structures. If the internal parts of the human
frame were a closed page to-morrow, so to remain for the
next half-century, and if the symptoms and results of
disease, and what will mitigate and cure them, were the
only permissible field of experiment, the art of healing
would lose nothing by ceasing to hold intercourse with the
sciences of structure and function—at all events, for a
time.
For example, I assert that the whole science of tubercle
is trivial and valueless in its results upon the curing of
consumption ; and equally inefficient in showing the cause
of consumption ; and that cod liver oil and general régime,
which have no logical or real connection with the morbid
anatomy of consumption, are the present important me
dical agencies for the treatment of that condition. And I
assert that the whole science of the vivisectional and
morbid anatomy of diabetes ; the artificial production of
it by lesions of the nervous system ; the conditions of it in
the liver, the lungs, and the kidneys, have nothing to do
with its cure, and throw no light upon its cause ; and that
the fact that in some instances it can be cured by the
Hydrastis Canadensis, the Leptandria, and Myrica cerifera,
has never yet been pointed to by any scalpel ; and is
likely to be resisted by the men of the scalpel longer than
by many others. What has the grand experience that a
�VIVISECTION.
53
certain herb or drug will cure a disease, to do with a
knowledge of the particular wreck that that disease
has left in the organisation after death?
Pathological
anatomy, except in surgical cases, never suggests cure.
Now then, sir, let us take stock in this great assize of
humanity and the healing art versus the cutting up of
live animals. Let us have tabulated statements of the
discoveries and results, and of the gain to man, which have
accrued from the introduction of vivisection. The great
facts, the benign arts that have been drawn out of the
intestine agonies of animals, can be easily stated in lines,
and columns of lines, if they exist. Let us have them.
We have had vivisection enough. Whole menageries have
been kept here and in Paris, and all over Europe, to have
their brains sliced and their bodies mangled. It has gone
on for hours a day, and year after year. What is the
stock in hand of results to humanity, to healing, or even
to permissible science?
For, good doctors, there are
sciences, and you will find it out, that are not permissible.
It would not be permissible to suspend a man or a woman
by a hook, to know ever so exactly how they would
writhe; no, not even if you were a painter.
And
therefore, I use the word, “ permissible ” science.
And I
say, that if you cannot show some mighty results, far
greater than the discovery of cod liver oil, and of the
circulation of the blood, your persistent vivisection leads
only to abominable sciences, and to the blackest of all the
black arts, the art of turning the human heart into
stone; after which the gutta serena of cruelty will soon
obliterate the poor eyesight of medicine.
Your constant reader,
J. J. Garth Wilkinson.
Brettell, Printer, 336a, Oxford street.
��
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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A free state and free medicine
Creator
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Wilkinson, James John Garth
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London; Glasgow
Collation: 53 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: Inscription on front page: 'M.D. Conway Esq. from the Author'. James John Garth Wilkinson was a homeopathic physician, social reformer, translator and editor of Swedenborg's works. Includes a letter on vivisection by the author to the editor of the Morning Star 20th August, 1863. Includes bibliographical references. "The pages headed Medical Freedom, appended to this Essay, formed a postscript to a small work of mine on a new Treatment of Small Pox, written some years ago [1864]" [Page [3]. Printed by Brettell, London. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
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F. Pitman
John Thomson
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1870
Identifier
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G5385
Subject
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Health
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A free state and free medicine), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
Health Services
Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Smallpox
Social Medicine
Vaccination
Vivisection