The age-herald., 1900-07-05


 Describing a field hospital at Bloemfon- ten, MT. Burdett Coutts writes:
 With no further equipment than two marqueeS and few bell tents, no addition of staff anything else, there were SIS patients of whom half were typhoids. Their condition was almost indescribable The tents were bell tents such were men, ! tioned in former letter as affording sleep- ing accommoda tions for six to eight or derlies when working in sound health. In many of the tents there were ten typhoid cases, lying closely together, the dying against the conyaleseent, the man in his crisis pressing against hastening to it. There was not room to step between them. Think of this, you who know of the sort of nursing a typhoid patient requires. With no beds or mattresses and only 42 stretchers in the whole hospital, it fol- { lowed that 274 patients had to lie on the earth. There was great scarcity of blank cts, and no patient could have more than one, with a waterproof sheet between his body and the ground. The ground is hard as a stone, and at night the temperature falls to freezing point. Besides other de- ficiencies which cannot be discovered. there were no sheets nor pillow cases, or pretense of bed linen of any kind, only the coarse rug which grated against the R sensitive skin, burning the fever.
 "The heat of these tents in midday was | over-powering, their odors sickening. Men turned over too weak to raise hand to brush the flies. off, trying in vain to dis lodge them by painful twitching of their features There was no one to do 1t for them. Seventeen orderleS had come With | or been raised for the half section field hos pital;1 ten had been taken from it, the number being made up from the bearer companies, but they had other duties to perform than brush flies off patients faces.
 Not Enough Attendants
 'At night there were not enough attend ants to prevent patients in the delir1ous stage from getting up and wandering about the camp half naked and in the bitter cold. In one tent, where four sleepless men with their eyes open and staring, in a case Of perforation, were groaning out life, huddled against his neighbor on the ground, men had not only to see but often to feel others.
 'It was sad and sickening spectacle which is described exactly as my eyes saw it and without exaggeration or excuse. l leave 1t and other similar facts not to wives and mothers-we will put them out of sght-but of hard, practical men, ac- customed to the hospitals of the poor of the medical profession of the great nurs. ing community, of the whole British public, who, at the moment of this sightseeing, were reading those comforting words spoken at Calais on April 26 as an advance courier of the ships two days later at the Reform Club Nothing that provision could suggest or that money could purchase was wanting anywhere. The supply was simp ly lavish, where nothing was sent up with the utmost promptitude.'
 We have hardly come yet to the ques- ton of local responsibility. Certainly in the case of this particular field hospital did not lie with it's chief medical officer who was an energetic. painstaking mem- Der of the R A. M. C., working day and night, never leaving his hospital, and sit ting down each evening to it's blue paper returns after fourteen hours work in the tents. Yes he said as we parted, we do our best, but it makes ones heart sick to look at them
 There is no need to pile on the agony, but worse remains behind which must be told. Therefore I will pass over an incl dental visit to the hospital after rain, when many of the patients typhoids, had , fncreased-were to be seen lying three inches deep in mud. These chief medical officers had been changed from reports this one was as painstaking as the last. He told at one time that his patients had increased to 496. Three hundred of these were typhoids.
 'The trained orderlies had been mostly taken away; in their places were twen- ty-ffve. untrained and ignorant privates from an infantry regiment, most of whom themselves were convalescents to do the work of nursing. The medical staff mafned always at three.
 Let the manual throw It's own light on this.
 '"The patients here were within 4 of the number, $40, allotted to general hospital. A general hospital has 20 medical men, IS trained nursing orderlies, 27 untrained pri- , vates, and nurses. The sick require far more skllful nursing.
 At Capetown was the hospital crowded with typhoid patients, left to three doctors and twenty-three privates and no nurses. With one more incident, graver than all the rest, the dark history of a field hos pital at Bloemfontein must close. On, the occasion of my last visit, the hospital had been mostly emptied, as it. was to move on to the front. In the course of this pro- cess twenty of the worst cases were re- moved to a more permanent hospital, mile and half off. How were they taken? They were lifted out of their tents and put into rough OK wagons-all typhoids- and many of them dangerously ill. and then jolted across the veldt, which in this place is much broken by spruits and gull lies.'
 "Better live well than i've long" You