The ration used here, or the system of dietary, was not constant; neither do we know sufficiently well the quantity, or quality, or variety, to form a true and candid estimate of its value in sustaining the physical strength, or repairing the waste and metamorphose of the organs and tissues of the system.
We know, however, that it was supposed to be bacon, flour, and corn bread—rarely fresh meat; and vegetables were almost unknown. The only vegetables and delicacies were either obtained in exchange, at exorbitant rates, for the little currency which the prisoners had managed to secrete among their rags, or they were now and then introduced stealthily by a few of the humane surgeons at the peril of their lives. Persons whose systems are weakened by want of proper food, by exhaustion from excessive labor, or exposure, or disease, require a great variety of articles from which to select the substances which a depraved but instinctive palate often craves. Food which would disgust the healthy appetite, will not quicken into action the debilitated and flickering sensation of taste. During an enfeebled condition, loathsome morsels become injurious; for digestion is clearly at the command of the mind, and is often checked by its caprices.
IX.
The effect of gentle care and kindly sympathy is more felt, more marked in the military hospitals, than in the civil. Home is farther away, and the sense of loneliness which all invalids experience is far more oppressive. Here it is that woman’s influence is the strongest, and her sweet disposition, her friendly, compassionate smile, seems to prolong life, and put to flight the advancing shadows of death. “It is not medicine,” says Charles Lamb; “it is not broth and coarse meats served up at stated hours with all the hard formality of a prison; it is not the scanty dole of a bed to lie on which a dying man requires from his species. Looks, attentions, consolations, in a word, sympathies, are what a man most needs in this awful close of human sufferings. A kind look, a smile, a drop of cold water to a parched lip—for these things a man shall bless you in death.”
With soldiers, these little attentions have great effect; partly from the law of contrast with the roughness of their every-day occupations and life, and partly from the rarity of such influences. And finally, when grim Death appears, there is with them a singular philosophy, calmness, and resignation. The writer has observed this upon many battle-fields, and in the hospitals far removed. Rarely do we hear lamentations, regrets, and shrieks for help: the conscious man folds his arms, and resigns himself to his inward thoughts, thinking, perhaps, of
“His native hills that rise in happier climes,
The grot that heard his song of other times,
His cottage home, his bark of slender sail,
His glassy lake, and broomwood blossomed vale.”
X.
The forms of disease observed here were simple, and they seldom exhibited positive indications, or, rather, the immediate effects and influences of malaria. Neither of the four great pestilential diseases appeared—cholera, yellow fever, plague, or remittent fever.
The diseases treated, or noted down rather upon the hospital register, were generally the different forms of inanition, or of exhaustion of the powers of life by the absorption of noxious vapors, or by the exposure when in feeble condition to the extremes of heat and moisture.
The mortality among the patients removed to this place was perfectly appalling. Nearly eight hundred men out of every thousand perished. Yet this might have been foretold from the horrible condition, the pre-arranged destitution of the hospital. Besides carefully selected food, pure and dry air is indispensable for the recovery of a diseased condition, and damp and vitiated air is sure to retard improvement, or to induce complications.