The work of the Sanitary Commission may be naturally and conveniently classed under five heads.
First, the work undertaken for the prevention of sickness and suffering.
Second, the Special Relief Department.
Third, the Hospital Directory.
Fourth, the assistance given to stationary hospitals.
Fifth, the grand operations in the front, on or near the actual battle-field.
The efforts for the prevention of suffering and sickness are first in order of time, and possibly first in importance. When this war commenced, we had no wounded and we had no sick. What we did have was a crowd of men full of untrained courage, but who knew little or nothing about military discipline, and as little in regard to what was necessary for the preservation of their health. What we did have was hundreds and thousands of officers, taken from every walk of life, who were, for the most part, men of great natural intelligence, but who did not at all comprehend that it was their duty not only to lead their men in battle, but to care for their health and their habits, and who had never dreamed that such homely considerations as what are the best modes of cooking food, what are the most healthy localities in which to pitch tents, what is the right position for drains, had anything to do with the art of war. What we did have was surgeons, many of whom had achieved an honorable reputation in the walks of civil life, but who, on this new field, were alike inexperienced and untried. The manifest danger was, that this mass of living valor and embodied patriotism would simply be squandered,—that, as in the terrible Walcheren Expedition, or in the Crimea, the men whose strength and courage might decide a campaign would only furnish food for the hospital and the grave.
Who should avert this danger? The Government could not. It had no time to sit down and study sanitary science. It was bringing together everything, where it found—nothing. Out of farmers and merchants and students it was organizing the most efficient of armies. It was sending its agents all over the world to buy guns and munitions of war. It was tasking our factories to produce blankets and overcoats, knapsacks and haversacks, wagons and tents, and all that goes to make up the multifarious equipment of an army. It was peering into our dock-yards to find steamers and sailing-vessels out of which to gather makeshift navies, until it could find leisure to build stancher ships. Manifestly the Government had no time for such a work. The existing Medical Bureau was hardly equal to the task. Organized to take charge of an army of ten thousand men, in the twinkling of an eye that army became five hundred thousand. At the beginning of the war the medical staff must have been very busy and very heavily burdened. With great hospitals to build, with troops of willing, but young and inexperienced surgeons to train to a knowledge of their duties and to send east and west and north and south, with every department of medical science to be enlarged at once to the proportions of the war, it had little leisure for excursions into fresh fields of inquiry. That it brought order so quickly out of chaos, that it was able to extemporize a good working system, is a sufficient testimony to its general fidelity and efficiency. It was the Sanitary Commission which undertook this special duty. It undertook to find out some of the laws of health which apply to army life, and then to scatter the knowledge of those laws broadcast.