Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/186

174 years' service amid the icebergs of Labrador, his ship was ordered to sail immediately for the West Indies. . . . He proceeded to the station with a crew of one hundred and fifty men, visited almost every island in the West Indies and many of the ports in the Gulf of Mexico; and, notwithstanding the transition from extreme climates, returned to England without the loss of a single man." He adds that "every precaution was used, by lighting stoves between decks and scrubbing the decks themselves with hot sand, to insure the most thorough dryness." He had learned "how to do it." When in command of the Recruit, off Vera Cruz, he lost no men, while the other ships anchored around him lost from twenty to fifty each, and constant communication was kept up, and all were exposed to the same climatic influences. Not a case of sickness even occurred on his ship. Where he said "dryness of the ship," read dryness of the house, and one great secret of household sanitation is learned. When the first emigrant ships went to Australia, one third of the passengers died and were buried in the sea; but, through the force of sanitation applied because the shippers were compelled to alter their terms, and were paid for those landed alive, the death-rate was soon made smaller than when the same persons were living ashore.

Through the experience gained in the Crimean War, and largely under the inspiration of Miss Nightingale, a systematic application of better methods began to be made, in the hope of diminishing the awful mortality in the Indian army, and the English were not slow to appropriate the garnered wisdom of other countries. In 1858 public attention was directed to what had been called the "British Juggernaut in India." It was shown that without war or famine a regiment of a thousand men dissolved away at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five a year, so that in eight years not a man of the original thousand remained. A sanitary commission was appointed, and they investigated among other things a series of distinguished preventive sanitary works, in the town of Bonfaric, in Algeria. It was found that the death rates had been reduced among the military from eighty to thirteen in the thousand; while the children, of whom it had been believed, as in India, that a third generation could not be raised, on account of the deadly nature of the climate, were as healthy as those in the most healthy towns of France.

Of course, sanitation under military authority can be very efficiently carried out, and every fruitful idea, whether from France or America, was acted on, with the result of reducing the death-rate for the decade preceding 1878 to less than twenty in the Indian army and twelve in the home army. In the entire British army—home, colonial, and Indian—the saving of lives in the decade under consideration was more than forty thousand.