Gunshot injuries, their history, characteristic features, complications, and general treatment : with statistics concerning them as they have been met with in warfare / by Sir T. Longmore.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gunshot injuries, their history, characteristic features, complications, and general treatment : with statistics concerning them as they have been met with in warfare / by Sir T. Longmore. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    killed and wounded left by the Russians to be incalculable—that the French surgeons found themselves destitute of all means of dressing their patients. They therefore, under Larrey’s direction, made use of the paper found in the Government Record Office, which was occupied as a hospital, instead of lint. For charpie they substituted tow and the cotton of the common white birch. Paper even was spread as bedding for the patients to lie upon, for no straw or other suitable materials were to be obtained; all the furniture of the city had been pillaged and carried away, or was destroyed by the fire which consumed a great number of the houses.23 At another time, in Syria, when there was a want of butcher’s meat to make broth for the wounded, Larrey, with the approval of the general commanding the division, sacrificed a number of camels for the purpose. When this resource failed, he used horse-flesh. As a substitute for salt, gunpowder was em- ployed, the nitre in it taking the place of the ordinary salt. The great Robert Jackson, whose writings are most worthy of perusal by all army medical officers,. was made a prisoner during the American War of Independence, when he was serving in the 71st Regiment. He at once occupied himself in aiding the wounded, and no materials for dressings being at hand, he took off his shirt and tore it up into bandages.24 Swords, bayonets, fire-arms, bits of branches from a tree, strips of uniform taken from the dead, pocket-handkerchiefs, and other such extempore means, have often been turned to account in place of regular splints and bandages, and, when judiciously applied, have supported broken limbs during the conveyance of wounded men from a field of action almost as efficiently as the best apparatus specially designed for the purpose. It is vain to expect to obtain in the field all the numerous appliances and instruments which are to be met with in a civil hospital in the midst of a civilised community. Yet some would appear to expect to find them there on all occasions and under all circumstances. It is stated in a report written by an eminent French surgeon of the surgical operations performed after the great battle of Solferino during the Italian campaign of 1859, that the insignificant number of resections of joints was not to be attributed to a voluntary abandonment of the operation, but that it was owing to the fact that the resection instruments did not reach headquarters until a week after the event.25 But every surgical instrument case will surely contain a scalpel and a narrow saw, and, with these instruments alone, any resection ought to be undertaken rather than unnecessarily sacrifice a limb by ampu- tation. The mind of the military surgeon should be trained to making himself familiar with such expedients. In this way, whenever professional difficulties of the kind above indicated arise, a good field surgeon will be ready to prove his superiority by exhibiting aptitude in turning to account every available resource