AMBULANCE
A’MBULANCE, a military term which is somewhat differently applied in different countries. In France, an A. is a portable hospital, one of which is attached to every division of an army in the field, and provided with all the requisites for the medical succor of sick or wounded troops. Such an A. is stationed at some spot removed from immediate danger; and soldiers are sedulously employed after a battle in seeking out those who have fallen, and conveying them to the A. Baron Larrey, during the great wars of the First Napoleon, brought this department of medical business to a high degree of efficiency, and set an example to the rest of Europe. When England engaged in war with Russia in 1854, the A. arrangements, like many others relating to the army, were in a very imperfect state. In the English army, A., strictly speaking, means a field hospital with all its wagons, litters, tents, cooking canteen, &c-; but sometimes the name is applied to a four-wheeled wagon or a two-wheeled cart fitted up for the reception of wounded men. When Lord Raglan was about to be sent out with the army, Dr. Guthrie, President of the College of Surgeons, devised a new form of A. cart; while Dr. Andrew Smith, Director-general of the Army and Ordnance Medical Department, invented a new A. wagon.
Annexed is a figure of Dr. Guthrie’s A. cart. The badly wounded were laid on it at full length, while those slightly hurt sat in front and rear, and on the sides. A stretcher is slung from the top for the accommodation of the former. The back-board is let down for cases requiring amputation. The hospital chests are lashed underneath. Many of Smith’s A. wagons and of Guthrie’s A. carts were at once made and sent out to the East; but they were not at the proper place when most wanted. After the battle of the Alma, the English were almost entirely destitute of means for conveying their wounded down to the beach; but the French had for this purpose a large number of camlets, suggested to them by their experience in Algeria. Each of these consists of two easy-chairs, slung in panniers across the back of a mule; and it is accordingly available along tracks where no wheel-carriage could pass. These cacolets have since been adopted in the English army, as well as improved, hand-litters, wheeled-litters or barrows, and ambulance wagons on a more modern model than those of Smith and Guthrie, but having the same general character. The American War, the wars of 1866 and 1870, and above all, the growth of volunteer aid societies under the influence of the Geneva Convention of 1866 (which gave to the wounded and their attendants the privileges of neutrality), have largely developed the ambulance equipments of every European army. Every international exhibition now contains an immense number of designs for the safe transport of the wounded. The most remarkable step taken in this direction has been the organization of railway ambulances. Trains of carriages either built for the purpose, or adapted from the ordinary rolling stock, can now be fitted up as moving hospitals, with their staff of surgeons and attendants; and by means of these railway ambulances the wounded can be safely and rapidly removed from the encumbered field hospitals to the permanent hospitals of the great cities of their own country. All the fittings for thus adapting railway trains to hospital purposes are now kept permanently m store in many of the countries of the continent.