Holmes shook the grimy hand, and then stood a moment looking back to the mill, from which the hands were just coming, and then down at the phaëton moving idly down the road. How cold it was growing! People passing by had a sickly look, as if they were struck by the plague. He pushed the damp hair back, wiping his forehead, with another glance at the mill-women coming out of the gate, and then followed the phaëton down the hill. * * * * * HEALTH IN THE HOSPITAL. In preparing to do the duty of society towards the wounded or sick soldier, the first consideration is, What is a Military Hospital? No two nations seem to have answered this question in the same way; yet it is a point of the first importance to them all. When England went to war last time, after a peace of forty years, the only idea in the minds of her military surgeons was of Regimental Hospitals. There was to be a place provided as an infirmary for a certain number of soldiers; a certain number of orderlies were to be appointed as nurses; and the regimental doctor and hospital-sergeant were to have the charge of the inmates. In each of these Regimental Hospitals there might be patients ill of a great variety of disorders, from the gravest to the lightest, all to be treated by the same doctor or doctors. These doctors had to make out statements of all the diets, as well as all the medicines required by their patients, and send in their requisitions; and it might be said that arrangements had to be separately made for every individual patient in the whole army. The doctors went to work each in his own way, even in the case of epidemics. There was no knowing, except by guess, what diseases were the most to be apprehended in particular places or circumstances; nor what remarkable phenomena of disease were showing themselves on any extended scale; nor what improvements could be suggested in the treatment. There was no possibility of such systematic cleanliness and such absolute regularity of management as can be secured by organization on a large scale. Yet the medical officers preferred the plan to any other. One plea was, that the medical officers and the patients were acquainted with and attached to each other: and this was very true. Another consideration was, that each surgeon liked to have his field of duty to himself, and found it an advantage to have a large variety of ailments to treat, to the constant improvement of his experience. They said that doctors and patients and nurses all liked the Regimental Hospital best, and this was clear proof that it was the best. They could at that time say also, that every soldier and every doctor had a horror of General Hospitals, where the mortality was so excessive during the Peninsular War that being carried to the General Hospital was considered the same thing as being sentenced to death.