Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/233

 SCTFFERINGS OF THE ARMIES. 189 asain and again and again brought crowding CHAP. o o o o o VTTT into the hospitals, gave continually more and L_ more strength to the poisons at work ; and thus it resulted that, concurrently with the march of improvement in all that observers could see when passing through wards and corridors, the rate of death to the hundred on the number Mortality in of cases treated rose every month higher and taisonthe higher.('^-^) From 8 per cent upon the cases treated in the four weeks which ended on the 11th of November, it rose in the next four weeks to 15 ; in the next, to 17 ; in the next, to 32 ; and in the next (the four weeks of February 1855), to the enormous proportion of 42 per cent ; (^^) and in the Kululi hospital during those four weeks, the number of deaths proved so great as to equal more than one-half of the number of cases treated, being 52 in the hundred.('^^) During a period of only seven months from The deaths ^ ^, ^ r, A 1 P A -1 that took the 1st of October 1854 to the end of April place in our hospitals. 1855, and out of an average strength or only 28,939, there perished in our hospitals, or on board our invalid-transport ships, 11,652 inen,(^^) of whom 10,053 died from sickness alone ; (^^) and of the maladies causing all this mortality, the proportion which ranges under the head of ' Zymotic ' was transcendently great (^^) — so great indeed that Science in some of her moods has computed it at even nine-tenths. For the purpose of any comparison worked strict com- ,„^. . parison im- out into figures between the enect oi the winter practicable -r-i 1 1 • pp 1 -n T 1 between the on the J^rench, and its enect on the ii,nglish effect of ti.o