prisoners engaged my most serious and earnest consideration. More than 30,000 men crowded upon twenty-seven acres of land, with little or no shelter from the intense heat of a Southern summer, or from the rain and from the dew of night, with coarse corn bread from which the husk had not been removed, with but scant supplies of fresh meat and vegetables, with little or no attention to hygiene, with festering masses of filth at the very doors of their rude dens and tents, with the greater portion of the banks of the stream flowing through the stockade a filthy quagmire of human excrements alive with working maggots, generated by their own filthy exhalations and excretions, an atmosphere that so deteriorated and contaminated their solids and fluids that the slightest scratch and even the bites of small insects were in some cases followed by such rapid and extensive gangrene as to destroy extremities and even life itself.

A large number of operations have been performed in the hospital on account of gangrene following slight injuries and mere abrasions of the surface. In almost every case of amputation for gangrene the disease returned, and a large proportion of the cases have terminated fatally.

I recorded careful observations upon the origin and progress of these cases of gangrene, and examined the bodies after death and noted the pathological changes of the organs and tissues. The results of these observations will be forwarded to the Surgeon-General at the earliest practicable moment.

After concluding my labors amongst the Federal prisoners I moved to Macon and instituted a series of inquiries and investigations upon the hospital gangrene, which has prevailed to so great an extent in the Army of Tennessee during the recent disastrous campaign, and especially since the evacuation of Atlanta.

The doubtful, if not dangerous and disastrous, policy of collecting the cases of hospital gangrene into one hospital devoted exclusively to its treatment was inaugurated amongst the general hospitals of the Army of Tennessee, and about 300 cases of hospital gangrene were collected at the Empire Hospital at Vineville, near Macon. I am at the present time engaged in investigating that disease in all its various tabes at this gangrene hospital. I have made numerous an a lyses of the blood and exertions and executed life-size drawings of the gangrenous parts. These drawings illustrate not only the appearance of the wound at different stages of the disease, but also the permanent disability which gangrene produces by the contraction of the injured muscles. I am also at the same time investigating the origin and causes of this disease in the Army of Tennessee, examining the hospital records as well as all cases of interest, and have addressed numerous important inquiries to the various medical officers. As soon as my labors with the Macon hospitals are completed I will institute similar investigations in the Confederate hospitals of Columbus, Ga.

These active labors in the field will engaged my attention for one or two months longer, and immediately after the close of the investigation (if Providence permits) I will prepare my full report upon hospital gangrene, which will embody the results of my investigations upon this disease in various parts of the Confederacy, in the general hospitals in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, and will embrace also the more recent investigations at Andersonville, Macon, and Columbus, Ga. I will spare no effort and no expenditure of time and labor in the preparation of this report, with the hope that it may prove of value to the medical department of the Confederate Army and worthy of the consideration of the Surgeon-General.