There must be much to learn from any great assemblage of sickness, under circumstances which can be fully ascertained, even at home,--and much more in a foreign climate. The medical body of every nation has very imperfect knowledge of classes and modifications of diseases; so that one of the strongest desires of the most learned physicians is for an improved classification and constantly improving nomenclature of diseases; and hospital-records afford the most direct way to this knowledge. Thus, while the phenomena are frittered away among Regimental or unorganized General Hospitals, a well-kept record in each well-organized hospital will do more than all other means to promote the scientific understanding of disease.
The statistics of disease in armies, the ascertainment of the numbers who sicken and who die of particular diseases, would save more lives in future generations than can be now appreciated; but what can the regimental surgeon do towards furnishing any trustworthy materials to such an inquiry? A dozen doctors, with each his smattering of patients, can learn and teach but little while they work apart: whereas a regular system of inquiry and record, in action where the sick are brought in in battalions, is the best possible agency. Not only are these objects lost when surgeons are allowed to make the great hospital a mere receptacle for a cluster of small and desultory hospitals, but the advantages of a broad study of diseases and their treatment are lost. Inestimable facts of treatment are learned by watching, at the same time and in the same place, a ward full of patients ill of the same disease. People of all countries know this by the special learning which their physicians obtain in large civil hospitals: and the same thing happens in military hospitals, with the additional advantage that the information and improved art tend to the special safety of the future soldiery, in whatever climate they may be called on to serve.
There has long been some general notion of the duty of army-surgeons to record what they saw in foreign campaigns; but no benefit has been reaped till of late. The works of French field-surgeons have long been justly celebrated; but I do not know that in the statistics and the nomenclature of disease they have done much more than others. The English surgeons carried or sent home in 1810 a mass of papers about the Walcheren fever, and afterwards of the diseases of the Peninsular force: but the Director General of the Medical Department considered such a bulk of records troublesome, and ordered them to be burnt! Such an act will never be perpetrated again; but directors will have a more manageable mass of documents to deal with henceforth. With a regular system of record, at a central station of observation, much more may be done with much less fatigue to all parties.