In the first place, adequate hospital facilities have been arranged for. One hospital alone has a capacity for 20,000 beds. At an emergency call, the hospitals can handle twenty per cent. of the whole Amexforce. To begin with the trenches, the Medical Department has introduced a sort of folding litter that can go around corners without having to make a man who's hit get out and walk around the bends. When he gets to the dressing station or collecting hospital, motor ambulances are ready to take him back to the evacuating hospital, where the women nurses take their chances with the men, eight to ten miles behind the line.
Once his case is looked into there, he continues under the charge of that hospital chief until he gets well or is sent home. If he's moved to another hospital his record and register go with him, so that the new hospital knows immediately he was invalided for a piece of shell in his leg, and no flurried or overworked surgeon tries to operate on him for inflammation of the intestines.
From beginning to end, the best specialists in the whole of the Union are at the disposal of any one who's unfortunate enough to get hurt. If it's eyes, ears, throat, abdomen, shell shock, mental derangement, or no matter what, one of the biggest men from home is on the job. They are not correspondence school surgeons, either.
Some of the Experts.
Maybe one of these is from your own home town and you know him by name or reputation: George E. Brewer, New York; George W. Crile, Cleveland; Henry Cushing, Boston, the brain specialist, who knows every cell in the think tank and just how it works and operates; F. A. Washburn, Boston; Samuel Lloyd, New York; C. L. Gibson, New York; R. H. Harte, Philadelphia; F. A. Besley, Chicago; Angus McLean, Detroit; Charles H. Peck, New York; John M. T. Finney, of Johns Hopkins, Baltimore; F. T. Murphy, St. Louis; M. Clinton, Buffalo; R. T. Miller, Pittsburgh; C. R. Clark, Youngstown, O.; E. D. Clark, Indianapolis; B. R. Shurley, Detroit; Joseph E. Flynn, Yale Medical.
If that isn't enough, associated with each of these men are other doctors whose ability is pretty well known all over the States. For instance, Dr. Lloyd, of New York, has with him Dr. McKernon, also of the big town, one of the best ear specialists in the country. If a shell goes off too near you and the eardrum suffers, Dr. McKernon will be on the job to find out if he can't make a new one.
A man who has just come over from Baltimore said the Army had practically cleaned out Johns Hopkins University there, which produces more good doctors to the square inch than France does fleas. So when it comes to sorting out the cases, the men with the bad listeners won't be sent to the throat specialist, nor the chap with a wounded eye made a candidate for the brainstorm man.
The Army's Big Eye Man.
Cases of eye wounds or troubles are handled by a doctor who probably knows more about the eye than any one man in America, Dr. George de Schweinitz, of Philadelphia, who has transplanted his whole sanitarium to France in order that no man of the Amexforce may be deprived of his sight where there is one chance in a million of saving it. With that in view, the chances of coming out of this mess with both eyes are exceptionally good. Statistics from both French and British armies show that of all the wounded they have had, only one man in 1,200 is blinded. If they had had the organization of the American medical force, the chance would probably have been reduced to one man in 2,500.
No one pretends to say that our hospitals make sickness or wounds a pleasure, but be assured of one thing. If anything happens to you, you'll be well looked after in them by the world's leading medical and surgical authorities.