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 Until the middle of June Dr. Foster devoted most of his time to the hospital, if such it might be called; but he acted purely in an individual capacity, and, besides Dr. Gamage, any other practitioner was at liberty to visit and prescribe for any patient. Everything was entirely informal and fortuitous. No attempt was made to stabilize or systematize the service. Foster unluckily did not add to his professional attributes the gift of organization, or indeed the power of ordinary forethought. He secured no regular staff, accumulated no medical supplies, and arranged for no expansion of the hospital accommodations. Yet this should not, perhaps, be imputed against him. He was only a sort of contract surgeon, and had received no instructions from his employers. For, in spite of the warning of Lexington, the Provincial Congress, although composed largely of doctors, still took no steps to form a proper medical corps for their rapidly increasing forces.

This characteristic apathy toward sanitary matters rested, after all, on a foundation of ignorance. The functions of a military hospital were then very imperfectly understood. A few veterans of the Old French War, fifteen or twenty years before, might recall the medical arrangements of the British troops with whom they had served—arrangements which seem to have been of unusual completeness and excellence. (It was