Army Hygiene and its Lessons¹

Abstract

UNTIL quite recent years it has never been sufficiently recognised that a very large proportion of Army medical effort should be directed towards the prevention of disease. The fact that in all wars in the past more men died from disease than from enemy action appears to have been accepted more or less with resignation, and regarded as inevitable. During the later years of the nineteenth century the increasing advances in science and our more exact knowledge regarding the ætiology and transmission of infective diseases led many medical officers to attempt to create barriers against tjie spread of disease by known paths, but there was a lamentable lack of co-ordinated effort.