The War’s Lesson on Health Reform
By L. A. S.
A REMARKABLE testimony to the value of the principles of dietetic reform which constitute an essential part of the reform message borne to the world by Seventh-day Adventists, comes from the theater of military operations in the far East. While many individual proofs of the hygienic importance of an abstemious diet have been given in the history of the health reform movement, it remained for a terrible war to furnish a demonstration of the same thing on a scale which brings this truth at once before the eyes of the whole world. Such an object-lesson is being furnished by the Japanese army. The facts were brought before the Association of Military and Naval Surgeons, in session at St. Louis, October 12, by Major Louis L. Seaman, who went to Japan and thence to Manchuria12in June last to investigate Japanese medical methods in war. From a report of his address which was published in the New York Sun, we take the following:— “The Japanese soldier has been taught how to treat his intestines; and consequently his intestines are now treating him with equal consideration. His plain, rational diet is digested—metabolized and assimilated. It is not an irritating, indigestible, fermenting mess, acting as a local irritant, and producing gastritis, duodenitis, enteritis, colitis, hepatitis and the long list of inflammatory intestinal processes with which we were all so familiar in the hospital wards at Camp Alger, Chattanooga, Tampa, Cuba, Porto Rico, Montauk Point, etc., in 1898. “The great hospitals are there, interne, contagious, and infectious departments, their conspicuously empty beds voicing, more eloquently than words, the most important lesson of the war. A few cases of diseases of the respiratory system are found—colds, bronchitis, and an occasional pneumonia, contracted through exposure in fording rivers, exhaustive marches, and bivouacking on wet ground, a few more of typhoid (I saw only three in Manchuria), occasionally one of dysentery, and a number of cases of beri beri, that former scourge of Oriental armies. “But of all the many thousands gathered in these institutions, there were but a few medical cases, and of these scarcely a baker’s dozen came under the heading of ‘diseases of the digestive system.’ Therein lies one of the greatest secrets of the Japanese success. Napoleon never made a more truthful statement than when he said: ‘An army fights on its belly.’ The Japanese have that belly, and they take good care to keep it in fighting order, not by insulting it three times a day by cramming it with material totally unsuited to the soldier’s necessities, thereby exciting irritations and disease, but by supplying it with a plain, palatable, easily prepared and easily digested ration that can be thoroughly metabolized and converted into the health and energy that make its owner the ideal fighting machine of the world to-day. “The organization of the medical department of the Japanese army and navy is modeled after that of the Germans, with many added improvements. Too much praise can not be bestowed upon the medical department of the army and navy for their splendid preparatory work in this war. The Japanese are the first to recognize the true value of an army medical corps. The medical officer is omnipresent. You will find him in countless places where in an American or British army he has no place. He is as much at the front as in the rear. He is with the first screen of scouts, with his microscope and chemicals, testing and labeling wells, so the army to follow shall drink no contaminated water. When the scouts reach a town, he immediately institutes a thorough examination of its sanitary condition, and if contagion or infection is found, he quarantines and places a guard around the dangerous district. Notices are posted so the approaching column is warned, and no soldiers are billeted where danger exists. Microscopic blood tests are made in all fever cases; and bacteriological experts, fully equipped, form part of the staff of every divisional headquarters. “The medical officer is also found in camp, lecturing the men on sanitation, and the hundred and one details of personal hygiene—how to cook, to eat, and when not to drink, to bathe, and even to the direction of the paring and cleansing of the finger nails to prevent danger from bacteria. Up to August 1, 9,862 cases had been received at the reserve hospital at Hiroshima, of whom 6,636 were wounded. Of the entire number up to that time, only thirty-four had died. “If the testimony of those conversant with the facts can be accepted, supplemented by my own limited observations, the loss from preventable disease in the first six months of this terrible conflict will be but a fraction of one per cent. This, too, in a country notoriously unsanitary. Compare this with the fearful losses of the British from preventable disease in South Africa, or, worse, with our own losses in the Spanish-American War, where, in a campaign the actual hostilities of which lasted six weeks, the mortality from bullets and wounds was 268, while that from disease reached the appalling number of 3,862, or about fourteen to one, or seventy per cent,—1 per cent against seventy per cent. “Naturally one asks, Were these results anticipated? As an answer, the statement of a distinguished Japanese officer, when discussing with me the subject of Russia’s overwhelming numbers, is pertinent. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we are prepared for that. Russia may be able to place two million men in the field. We can furnish five hundred thousand. You know in every war four men die of disease for every one who falls from bullets. That will be the position of Russia in this war. We propose to eliminate disease as a factor. Every man who dies in our army must fall on the field of battle. In this way we shall neutralize the superiority of Russian numbers, and stand on a comparatively equal footing.’”