The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-09-23

and men were city bred, and before en- tering the service they had culled out Of the regiment every man and officer of doubtful health. They slept In the company streets, when they were dry, and kept their camp like a pin. The Fourteenth Minnesota physically were
 apparently in advance of the Peunsyl- Vania regiment, but they were largely country bred, slept in their tents, three and four to the tent The tents were not ventilated by window slots at either end of the ridge pole, and they usually dropped the flies at the entrance. The Second Ohio stood below both in health
 record. A hollow in the land stretched , through the camp. The First Pennsyl- vania and Fourteenth Minnesota were at it's head, the Second Ohio at the foot
 Later they got the wash from the rains
 and in spite of magnificent efforts, like
 the other two regiments, concluded to
 move. This brigade, officers and men,
 numbered about $500, with but one
 medical officer to regiment. The col
 onels, Good, Duzee, and Kertz, were able men, ever vigilant, kind and devo- ted to their duties, and I consider it a
 great privilege and honor to add them to the list of my many army friends.
 A regiment of troops in the field are
 too much for a single medical officer.
 Each regiment was originally provided
 with three, but two out of each regi- ment were detailed to other duties. At
 the field hospital these detailed sur
 geons were busy, hard-working men.
 But many of them were detailed to the
 ambulance corps, where they did noth- ing but play poker, crack jokes and watch the mules switch off flies, or sometimes do other amusing things such as mules will do I sent remon- strance through military channels to | corps headquarters, setting forth my, complaint, and asked that the medical
 officers of the brigade at the ambulance station be sent back to their regiments. Lieutenant-Colonel Huidekoper, the corps surgeon, refused to return my | medical officers. The division surgeon interfered and got one of them back
 Lieutenant Dorsey of the Fourteenth Minnesota.
 l will digress here to speak of the physical character of the soldiers of the
 entire division-13,00 900 men. Serving as member of the discharge board, I was
 almost daily examining soldiers for dis
 charge from the army. Among these
 men found no end of hernias, many of
 them existing at time of enlistment. One man had inguinal hernia and club | foot. Many had severe astigmatism. Some were deaf, scores of them had constitutional syphilis, and many had tuberculosis. A great many had organ e ic disease of the heart, and host had | bad feet or bad teeth. How could lot of physically bad men fail to make a large sick list? Were the doctors re- | sponsible for this? The medical men
 who passed these men into the service
 certainly were, but they got only forty cents per capita for examining these
 men as recruits. They had an excuse l for poor work. It was the same as that attributed to Mark Twain when pilot on the Mississippi river, when he was | upbraided by the captain, to whom he
 replied that he thought he was ''pilotin" very well for twelve dollars month. On August 1, I was detached by high
 CT authority and put in command of the Second division, First Army Corps Field hospital of 263 beds. At the hos
 pital I found 162 patients, six medical officers, lieutenant, commissary of subsistence and thirty mine out of nine ty-six emn who should have composed the hospital corps. Out of these thirty
 nine, I was to find kitchen men, labor
 CTS, guards. clerks and nurses. Of the number on hand some were physically ill-suited or actually ill. Six noble doc- tors were on duty-Majors Charlton Eagerly and Myers, Captain Dutton Lieutenants Little and Nesbit-taking all the three watches of eight hours each, and 162 patients. l was cut down to depend upon twelve or fourteen
 nurses for day and night duty. These
 were soldiers with only accidental ex-
 perience and but little of that, in civil life. Seventeen sick soldiers lay upon
 the ground. There was poor prepara- tion of food; limited supply of proper
 food for the very sick. Major Charlton,
 whom I relieved, was ill. The fault in this instance was two-fold. The div-
 sion surgeon and the purveyors of lum-
 Der, cots, etc, were to blame. I soon,
 but after much perplexity, got over the difficulties and the hospital fiourished.
 Typhoid fever, next to venereal disease, has been the scourge of the army at
 Camp George H. Thomas. What was
 it's origin? Why it's prevalence?
 Let us take side view of the subject. The typhoid bacillus is a specific germ.
 If introduced into the intestines of man
 it produces train of symptoms known
 as typhoid fever. Now, was it in the
 water or was it in the food? Suppose for
 a moment that 1t was not in either the water supply or army rations. How did
 it reach the soldiers? It is a fact that
 typhoid fever was prevailing in the
 neighborhood of Chickamauga Park be-
 fore the army camped there It is also
 stated that it developed in the first reg
 iments who camped in the park The
 people in the neighborhood sold milk and farm products to the soldiers, and if
 they had typhoid fever as it is known
 they had, they likely conveyed the ty-
 phoid germs in their milk-cans and
 probably in their fruit. They watered
 their milk probably with infected well
 water, and handled their sick and their
 fruit Typhoid fever was not epidemic
 at Camp Thomas and It's spread was
 not rapid until within two weeks. It
 was spread from detached foci of infec-
 ton and not from one focus. I am con- vinced, after no little investigation, that
 the water supply from natural springs
 and the pipeline at Chfckamauga was
 good and did not contain the typhoid