26. In fevers and dysenteries, those soldiers recovered most certainly, and most speedily, who lay at the greatest distance from the walls of the hospitals. This important fact was communicated to me by the late Dr. Beardsley of Connecticut.
27. Soldiers are but little more than adult children. That officer, therefore, will best perform his duty to his men, who obliges them to take the most care of their HEALTH.
28. Hospitals are the sinks of human life in an army. They robbed the United States of more citizens than the sword. Humanity, economy, and philosophy, all concur in giving a preference to the conveniences and wholesome air of private houses; and should war continue to be the absurd and unchristian mode of deciding national disputes, it is to be hoped that the progress of science will so far mitigate one of its greatest calamities, as to produce an abolition of hospitals for acute diseases. Perhaps there are no cases of sickness in which reason and religion do not forbid the seclusion of our fellow creatures from the offices of humanity in private families, except where they labour under the calamities of madness and the venereal disease, or where they are the subjects of some of the operations of surgery.
Footnotes:
[51] “Cleanliness is founded on a natural aversion to what is unseemly and offensive in the persons of others; and there seems also to be an instinctive horror at strangers implanted in human nature for the same purpose, as is visible in young children, and uncultivated people. In the early ages of Rome, the same word signified both a stranger and an enemy.” Dr. Blane, p. 225.
[52] “It is proved, in innumerable instances, that sick men recover health sooner and better in sheds, huts, and barns, exposed occasionally to wind, and sometimes to rain, than in the most superb hospitals in Europe.” Jackson's Remarks on the Constitution of the Medical Department of the British Army, p. 340.