The practice of allowing some particular patient to become a sort of half orderly in the ward, letting him always attend some particular case, or give general help in severe cases, is most reprehensible. It is never allowed, whether in Civil or in Military Hospitals, without very bad consequences to the discipline of the ward. Where extra help, in lifting, &c., is required, let the Nurse require the most convalescent of the patients to help, but let her carefully refrain from selecting any patient or allowing any patient to put himself forward, as a regular help or quasi-Orderly. As an almost invariable rule it will be found that the less patients do for each other the better for themselves, and for the discipline and the good feeling of the ward. Let them be made useful in the wards, as far as possible, in such lighter cleaning, &c., as a patient can properly do (here, again, discretion is required, or a lazy Orderly will lay undue burdens on a willing patient); but the less they do for each other undoubtedly the better for all parties. I would not, however, expressly exempt the patients from being made useful in nursing the sick. A lazy or ill-conditioned patient might make it a handle to refuse to do or grumble at doing things which he ought to do, such as (a thing frequently required) giving and emptying a bed-pan to an ordinary patient who cannot leave his bed, while the Nurse and Orderlies are doing other things in the ward; assisting to move a helpless patient, if all the Orderlies are not at hand; sometimes watching or attending for an hour or so a critical case, &c., &c., &c. What the Superintendent-General and all Superintendents must be especially vigilant against is selecting any particular patient or allowing a willing patient constantly or often to do these things, and to become a quasi-Orderly to the ward or to any patient in it. Assistant-Surgeons, partly from inexperience and partly from spite, sometimes make this sort of quasi-Orderly of a patient. The Nurse should have the power of respectfully saying, in such a case, “The Regulations order me to do so and so, sir: I beg you to let me do my duty.” It is an important and should be, if possible, an invariable rule that no discharged patient is ever to enter any ward. Soldiers are, in many respects, on a different footing, as to each other, from Civil patients. The above provision is perhaps rendered thereby (not the less, but) the more important for the good order of the ward. Still this, desirable in (and the rule in several) Civil Hospitals, might be considered by Military as well as Medical Officers to interfere too much with the feeling of comradeship which, in its measure, is so essential a part of the soldier’s very peculiar condition. The following rules however might, at all events, be carried out. Some of them are actually in the “Hospital Regulations.”