Knights Hospitaller

“ And all Men employed about the Hospital ought to be reviewed once a Week by the Military Inspector, and likewise whenever a Party of Convalescents is going to join the Army, or their Regiments; that no Man may be allowed to remain with the Hospital, after he is fit to do Duty in his Regiment. ”

“ Take the advice of a friend, always seek the surgeon when you are ill or wounded. The old prejudice was, in its time, a just one; nowadays things are different."
I promised that I would do so. At the same time even to-day I fear the surgeon's knife more than an enemy's bayonet or sword or even lance, and the lance is what the infantry man most dreads—that is, of course, of weapons. However, I have not since the day I left the hospital at Oran ever been the occupant of a bed in one, and I sincerely hope that I may never see, as a patient at least, the whitewashed wall of a hospital again. ”

“ If every Officer on convalescent Duty conform to these Directions, no Man can ever be detained without his Knowledge in or about Hospitals, as he must always know where every Man is, in what State of Health, and how he is employed; and may at any Time be able to make a Return to the Brigade or Regiment for which he is employed, of every Man who is admitted, discharged, or dies in the Hospital. ”

“ The problem of taking care of an army's sick is indeed no easy one. Our army is still experimenting, or rather, it might be said, improving its system with some phases of the matter yet under discussion. The regimental hospital has been done away with, so that what was the hospital of the regiment is now only a medical [Pg 44] dispensary. Here, in response to the sick call at 6:15 every morning, you may see a crowd of soldiers, from 50 to 100 in number, lined up waiting to receive in turn their capsules and pills. ”

“ It is a curious reflection that whilst in the present war the base hospital has been given, if anything, an undue importance, in the other war it has been practically neglected. Our great hospitals are almost entirely field hospitals, planted right in the middle of the battle, and there we keep our patients till such time as they are to all intents and purposes cured. A very few convalescent homes will admit cases which still require treatment, but only a very few. ”

“ Here in the rear of the army for miles, was a succession of hospitals. Every house, and barn, and haystack, formed the nucleus of a hospital, where men, shot through the head, through the limbs, through the body; with every conceivable variety of wounds, lay groaning in anguish. Surgeons toiled day and night with never lagging zeal to relieve these sufferings, but all their labor could only afford slight relief. The labors of medical officers after a great battle are immense, and there is no respite from their toils so long as a wounded man remains uncared for. ”

“ I am as good as a Medical Times! But oh! you Gentlemen of England who sit at Home in all the well-earned satisfaction of your successful cases, can have little Idea from reading the newspapers of the Horror and Misery (in a Military Hospital) of operating upon these dying, exhausted men. A London Hospital is a Garden of Flowers to it.
We have had such a Sea in the Bosphorus, and the Turks, the very men for whom we are fighting, carry in our Wounded so cruelly, that they arrive in a state of Agony. ”

“ In the Barrack Hospital (and this, remember, was but one of eight, and these eight the English hospitals alone!) there were two or three thousand patients; it was a City of Pain. Its streets were long, narrow rooms or corridors, bare and gloomy; no furniture save the endless rows of cots and mattresses, "packed like sardines," as one eye-witness says; its citizens, men in every stage of sickness and suffering; some tossing in fever and delirium; some moaning in pain that even a soldier's strength could not bear silently; some ghastly with terrible wounds; some sinking into their final sleep. ”

“ Lord Herbert also named a committee to re-organize the army hospital corps. In former times there were no proper attendants on the sick. For regimental hospitals a steady man was appointed hospital sergeant, and two or three soldiers, fit for nothing else, were sent into the hospital, to be under the orders of the medical officer; who, if he were fortunate enough to find one man fit to nurse a patient, was sure to lose him by his being recalled "to duty;" sometimes, indeed, men were mounted in rotation over sick in hospital as they would mount guard over a store. ”

“ The hospitals, of course, must be just as much under the Inspector-General as the arrangements of the field are under the Commander-in-Chief, and consequently, any peculiarity of success in the recovery of the sick and wounded is as much to the appropriate praise of the former, as the wise array of a battle or a siege is to the distinct honour of the latter. ”

“ If there be separate Hospitals for the Surgery Patients, the eldest Surgeon ought to direct every Thing in the Hospital he attends; and when any Thing is wanted for his Hospital, to report the same to the Physician General.
The directing and purveying Branches ought never to be entrusted to the same Person, as the Temptation of accumulating Wealth has at all Times, and in all Services, given Rise to the grossest Abuses, which have been a great Detriment to the Service, as well as to the poor wounded and sick Soldiers, and has occasioned the Loss of many Lives. ”

“ He was kind-hearted, generous, ready to do or sacrifice anything for the real good of his patients; but his rules once laid down became immutable laws, not to be transgressed by any. His constant supervision and enforcement of rules affected every department of the hospital. In my own, I had only to report a dereliction of duty, and the fate of the culprit was sealed. If a woman, I had orders to discharge her; if a man, the next train bore him to his regiment or to the office of the medical director, upon whose tender mercies no wrong-doer could rely. ”

“ In the French Hospitals there are always a Number of Men who attend their Sick who belong to the Hospital, so that they have no Occasion to employ their Convalescents, as we are often obliged to do, where the Sick are attended by Nurses, who are commonly Soldiers Wives, and not so capable of doing such laborious Work as the Men. ”

“ The Serjeant of the Guard, attended by the Ward Master, ought, every Morning, to go round the Wards to call a Roll, and see that every Man is in his Ward; and to do the same at Night before the Hospital Doors are shut, and at this Time to order every Person out of the Hospital who does not belong to it. ”

“ HEALTH IN THE HOSPITAL. In preparing to do the duty of society towards the wounded or sick soldier, the first consideration is, What is a Military Hospital? No two nations seem to have answered this question in the same way; yet it is a point of the first importance to them all.
When England went to war last time, after a peace of forty years, the only idea in the minds of her military surgeons was of Regimental Hospitals. There was to be a place provided as an infirmary for a certain number of soldiers; a certain number of orderlies were to be appointed as nurses ”

“ As the Service often makes it necessary at Military Hospitals, where the Number of Sick is great, to employ the convalescent Soldiers [163] [406] as orderly Men and Servants about Hospitals, all Men thus employed ought to have a special Leave from the Military Inspector for so doing; and no Man should be employed in any Capacity as a Servant about an Hospital, who at that Time is on the Books as a Patient. ”

“ Such disadvantages might be entirely removed if parliament would decide to throw open every poor-law infirmary for clinical purposes, and to have connected with each such establishment a responsible visiting medical staff, consisting of the best qualified men to be found in the community which each hospital serves. The old prejudice against hospital treatment has disappeared, for the least intelligent members of the population now understand that, when a citizen is sick, there is no place so good as the wards of a well-administered hospital. ”

“ Passive resistance in every shape was resorted to, to prevent the installing of the nurses in the military hospitals. Against all this nothing but the exquisite tact, firmness, and good sense of Miss Nightingale could have prevailed. Having proved herself a vigorous reformer of hospital misrule, she had to encounter the tacit opposition of nearly all the principal medical officers; her nurses were sparingly resorted to, even in the barrack hospital, while in the general hospital, the headquarters of one of the chief medical authorities, she held a very insecure footing. ”

“ The custom was to make just as little show about sending sick men to the hospital, as possible, hence they were often packed off in the night, and the first their comrades would know of their illness would be a detail to bury them, or a boy would suddenly appear in his company, looking pale and sick, having been discharged from the hospital. If the men had known how many of their comrades were sent to the hospital, it would have demoralized the well ones. ”

“ Conan Doyle has told the story of the hospital orderly, but who shall tell the story of the doctor and the hospital nurse. In many cases they have laid down their lives for the men, and all have worked with a devotion that has seemed well-nigh super-human. But a medical staff sufficient for two army corps was altogether insufficient to supply the needs of an army of 200,000 and fight an epidemic of terrible severity. ”

“ It would be shocking to humanity to relate the history of our general hospitals in the years 1777 and 1779, when they swallowed up at least one-half of our army, owing to the system of placing nearly all the sick of the army in the general hospitals, where crowds and infection wrought a fearful mortality, and where more surgeons died in the American service in proportion to their number than officers of the line—a strong evidence that infection is more dangerous than weapons of war. ”

“ In the largest hospitals the administration of drugs and the dressing of wounds devolves entirely on the medical students, and nurses, whether Sisters of Mercy or lay, merely stand in the wards to watch the patients, and in case of need they have to go and summon a student. While I was in the hospital, I witnessed some shocking examples of the way in which sufferers were treated. I remember one night when a patient, who was suffering from a most serious attack of jaundice, cried out to the Sister on duty for a basin. ”

“ In conducting the Military Hospitals, we found that it was always right to discharge the Patients from the sick Hospitals as soon as they were recovered, and to send them either to Billet, or to a convalescent Hospital; because recovered Men are always the most riotous; besides they crowded the Hospitals, and were in Danger of catching fresh Disorders from those who were sick; and therefore the recovering Men in every Hospital ought to be reviewed once or twice a Week by the Physician or Surgeon, and the Names of such Men as are well enough, to be marked ”

“ All other charities are more or less liable to some sort of imposture, but that is almost impossible with a hospital. I remember, as a soldier in the old days, that there was a certain sort of complaint we used to call malingering. If a man wanted to shirk any duty he pretended to be ill, but was very soon found out by the regimental doctor. So in the same way hospital doctors will soon find out the malingerer. ”

“ The plan was then that the soldiers were to be cared for by the regimental surgeon as long as it was possible and then they were to be sent to the departmental hospital for further care.89 These two systems seemed to interfere with each others work and there was always jealousy existing between the director of the general hospital and the surgeons of the regiment. "There will be nothing but continued complaints of each other; the director of the hospital charging them with enormity in their drafts for the sick and they him with the same for denying such things as are necessary. ”

“ I visited both of the great hospitals, Savonières and Hôpital Central, inside of an hour, for a military automobile goes like lightning and turns aside for no one. The former hospital is situated in a beautiful park some distance from Bar-le-Duc, and the greater one in a cup of the hills, and looks like a new Western mining town. There are some twenty or thirty barracks, two of concrete; but it is so unmistakably a hospital and nothing else (in France) that a taube recently had no difficulty in picking out the main building and dropping a bomb in the operating room. ”

“ We were to have a Hospital in town, and, when required, were to take the field with the German Ambulance Corps. Our services were gladly accepted by the Surgeon-General, [162] and two large Hospitals were at once handed over to us; the first—a sick and fever Hospital—containing 150 men; the second, consisting of the railway terminus, with its waiting and refreshment rooms, stores and offices, in which lay 65 wounded; and there were beds to accommodate 150 more. We received, therewith, Hospital plant, and a staff of trained military infirmarians. ”

“ The employment of Extra Watchers can never be wholly prevented, but it should be the endeavour of every Hospital to employ such as seldom as can possibly be. Extra watching is most injurious to the health of all ward-servants, and to the sobriety, and therefore morality, of many paid ward servants. ”