MILITARY HOSPITALS. These are hospitals de signed and erected for the exclusive use of soldiers, and in some instances sailors, including every form of establishment, from the field dressing sta tion, or first hospital, keeping pace with the firing line, to the permanent institutions of the home country. Naturally, military hospitals are of comparatively recent origin; horn of the needs of warfare, and the advance of medical science and hygiene. In the Crimean War of 1854 the French alone of the allied powers possessed any thing approaching the equipment now common to all armies. The English wounded were carried off the field in rough-and-ready fashion, sailors' hammocks being ultimately utilized as a rude substitute for the French stretcher and ambu lance. Surgeons dressed the wounded on the field, for whom there was little or no after ac commodation, until, spurred by the publication of Florence Nightingale's description of condi tions, and the reports of special committees, the Government appointed Lord Herhert'f, commis sion, which resulted in more effective hospital service. Similarly, the great Civil War of Ameri
ca in 1861 may be said to be the parent of the present United States Army Hospital Service, if not also of the entire European system, the Eng lish branch of which proved so effective in the Boer-British War of 1899. The dread of soldier and sailor alike, and the equal despair of the surgeon, had up to 1861 been a swift and often fatal form of gangrene, peculiar to naval and military hospitals; this, with many other equally deadly phases of the old system, was effectually remedied during the Civil War. The desperate character of the fighting taxed the general surgi cal capacity of the nation; and with the gradual advance in hygiene, bacteriology, and antiseptic surgery, undoubtedly led to the comparative per fection of to-day.