The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 1, July-December, 1864 | Page 7

department of an army, like every other, is controlled by a system, and it is this which regulates its connections with the soldier more than the qualifications of individual surgeons. In the army the system takes care of everything, even to the minutest details. Hygienic regulations for preserving the salubrity of camps and the cleanliness of the troops and their tents, are prescribed and enforced. Every day there is a 'sick call' at which men who find themselves ill present themselves to the surgeons for treatment. If slightly affected, they are taken care of in their own quarters; if more seriously, in the regimental hospitals; if still more so, in the large hospitals established by the chief medical officer of the corps; and if necessary, sent to the Government hospitals established at various places in the country. To the latter almost all the sick are transferred previous to a march. To be ill in the army, amid the constant noises of a camp, and with the non-luxurious appliances of a field hospital, is no very pleasant matter; but the sick soldier receives all the attention and accommodation possible under the circumstances.
To every corps is attached a train of ambulances, in the proportion of two or three to a regiment. They are spring wagons with seats along the sides, like an omnibus, which can, when necessary, be made to form a bed for two or three persons. With each train is a number of wagons, carrying tents, beds, medicine chests, etc., required for the establishment of hospitals. On the march, the ambulances collect the sick and exhausted who fall out from the columns and have a surgeon's certificate as to their condition. When a battle is impending, and the field of conflict fixed, the chief medical officers of the corps take possession of houses and barns in the rear, collect hay and straw for bedding, or, if more convenient, pitch the tents at proper localities. A detail of surgeons is made to give the necessary attendance. While the battle proceeds, the lightly wounded fall to the rear, and are there temporarily treated by the surgeons who have accompanied the troops to the field, and then find their way to the hospitals. If the fighting has passed beyond the places where lie the more dangerously wounded, they are brought to the rear by the 'stretcher bearers' attached to the ambulance trains, and carried to the hospitals in the ambulances. Sometimes it happens that the strife will rage for hours on nearly the same spot, and it may be night before the 'stretcher bearers' can go out and collect the wounded. But the surgeons make indefatigable exertions, often exposed to great danger, to give their attention to those who require it. At the best, war is terrible--all its 'pomp, pride, and circumstance' disappear in the view of the wounded and dead on the field, and of the mangled remnants of humanity in the hospitals. But everything that can be devised and applied to mitigate its horrors is provided under the systematized organization of the medical department. In the Army of the Potomac, at least, and undoubtedly in all the other armies of the North, that department combines skill, vigor, humanity, and efficiency to an astonishing degree. Its results are exhibited not only in the small mortality of the camps, but in the celerity of its operation on the field of battle, and the great proportion of lives preserved after the terrible wounds inflicted by deadly fragments of shell and the still more deadly rifle bullet. Military surgery has attained a degree of proficiency during the experiences of the past three years which a layman cannot adequately describe; its results are, however, palpable.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Since that article was written, some changes of detail have been made, but the principles remain the same.]

?NONE:
A TALE OF SLAVE LIFE IN ROME.
CHAPTER VIII.
Raising himself with an assumed air of careless indifference, in the hope of thereby concealing the momentary weakness into which his better feelings had so nearly betrayed him, Sergius strolled off, humming a Gallic wine song. ?none also rose; and, struggling to stifle her emotion, confronted the new comer.
She, upon her part, stood silent and impassive, appearing to have heard or seen nothing of what had transpired, and to have no thought in her mind except the desire of fulfilling the duty which had brought her thither. But ?none knew that the most unobservant person, upon entering, could not have failed at a glance to comprehend the whole import of the scene--and that therefore any such studied pretence of ignorance was superfluous. The attitude of the parties, the ill-disguised confusion of Sergius, her own tears, which could not be at once entirely repressed--all combined to tell a tale of recrimination, pleading, and baffled confidence, as plainly