Notes in the Margin

Scutari, this 20th of February, 1855.

Dear Dr. Sutherland,

You will have my printed tables by the next conveyance, and they are correct as far as they go. But I write to tell you what the printed tables do not hold, because I have found this evening, turning back through the notebook I kept at the bedside in the Barrack Hospital, that the margins carry what the fair copy dropped.

In the margin beside the January entries, in pencil, I noted the smell of the wards on particular nights - not as sentiment, but because the smell preceded the deaths by some days, and I did not yet know how to make a column for it. The fair copy records 4,207 deaths in the hospital at Scutari for the month of February. The margin records that on the nights the smell came, the orderlies had been told to stop carrying the filth through the corridors because the path was needed for the stretchers. Both are true. Only one was printed, because only one could be counted.

Here is what I am learning, and I put it to you plainly. The finished table is an instrument of persuasion, and it persuades by leaving out. Lord Panmure will read the table and see numbers, and numbers he can dispute. He cannot dispute what I wrote in the margin at two in the morning while a man died of gangrene three beds from where I stood. But a margin is not evidence to anyone but the writer. So the work now is to build the collection form so that what lives in the margin has a column from the start - the state of the drains, the date the latrines were emptied, the number of patients per cubic foot of air. Not the nurse’s impressions afterward, but the fact recorded at the hour it occurred, by rule, in every hospital, in the same words.

The coxcombs I am drafting for the Commission will do this. A wedge for preventable deaths, a wedge for wounds, a wedge for other causes, in colours that cannot be misread across a committee room. The chart must make denial difficult.

I have ordered 300 copies of the mortality tables. The War Office has acknowledged receipt of one.

Your faithful friend, F.N.