bone and tissue injuries produced by modern firearms and explosives, and a careful preservation of such illustrations of disease as may be obtained upon cadaveric examination.
Colonel Bache's observations, with accompanying renewed directions as to methods of preparation and preservation of specimens and their delivery to the Museum, were published to the Medical Corps in the Surgeon General's Circular No. 10, 20 October 1898; 21[1] with what response does not appear. But the Spanish-American War, with its record of nearly seven times as many deaths from disease as from enemy bullets, with more than half the deaths from disease from one cause, typhoid fever, and with the specter of yellow fever lurking in the background, sounded a challenge to the best brains and the most devoted dedication to medical advancement.
The history of the Spanish-American War was, in a way, a repetition of that of the Civil War, in that a Medical Department, barely adequate for peacetime and actually forbidden by law to store up reserve supplies, was suddenly called upon to care for a tenfold increase in army numbers. Moreover, General Sternberg had been denied his request for allotment of a reasonable share of the emergency funds voted for defense purposes before the start of actual hostilities, and so was not permitted to anticipate his increased needs before the flood of raw volunteer troops fell upon his slender medical resources.
Typhoid soon became epidemic in nearly nine out of ten of the new regiments, and about one soldier in five contracted the disease. The reasons asscribed for these epidemics were numerous but, in the language of Col. P. M. Ashburn, "fundamentally they are one, ignorance." 22[2] To the task of dispelling the prevailing ignorance of the transmission of typhoid, and the equally unknown method of transmission of yellow fever, and so to make a beginning in the control of two of the major diseases of man, the Army Medical Museum was called.
