Page:Introductory lecture delivered to the class of military surgery in the University of Edinburgh, May 1, 1855 (IA b21916469).pdf/40

39 and as the number of fighting men diminished; to have succoured and assisted those men on their stormy passage across the Euxine, to have afterwards attended them in the hospitals on the Bosphorus, and to have returned to their regiments with such of them as might again have become fit to take the field. I am here only referring to what has repeatedly happened to myself. I have, over and again, been detached from my regiment with parties of sick, and it has happened to me to have served, more than once, in general and garrison hospitals, and to have sometimes had a portion of one of them given up to me for a regimental establishment, according to an arrangement which may, I believe, at this moment, be seen in the King's Infirmary, in the Phœnix Park, at Dublin, or at least was to be seen when I last visited that establishment some few years ago.

I know of no duty of a staff assistant-surgeon to which a regimental assistant is not competent, but I do not hold that the converse of this proposition is equally true. I have the highest opinion of that "esprit de corps," which is fostered by regimental intercourse, and those "ties of regimental discipline," which, as Dr. Millingen says, "constitute the superiority