On amputation at the hip-joint / by Richard G. Butcher.

  • Butcher, Richard G. H., 1819-1891.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On amputation at the hip-joint / by Richard G. Butcher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    yet it could not be denied that the chance of saving life occasionally depended upon a submission to the greatest temporary sulfering, and that without the most cruel of sacrifices the preservation of the patient was totally impossible. Dreadful as amputation at the hip appeared, both in respect to the magnitude of the part of the body to be removed and the extent of the wound caused by such removal, the desperate nature of some cases at length began to incline surgeons to view more dispassionately a scheme at which the mind at first naturally revolted. But yet, to show how the love of life—impressed, I believe, on man as his great safeguard—will protect him and regulate his actions to insure that security, I will just describe what Morand, the great French surgeon, the earliest practitioner who made this severe operation the subject of attention, has stated in his work on surgery (Opusc. de Chir. p. 183). He reminds the reader that in the Hotel des Invalides, at Paris, mutilated objects are in recollection who had lost all their thighs and arms, so that, unless assisted, they could not stir, and it was necessary to feed and wait upon them like new-born infants. Let it not be wondered at, then, how some are influenced by a relish for life. This same great surgeon, it would appear, was the first who ventured to express an opinion on the possibility of the success of the operation. This question was taken up with much assiduity by the Academy of Surgery, and a favourable report was returned by Ledran and Guerin. It became then a prize question in the French Academy, at the instance of Morand, in 1756, and again in 1759; none of the essays on the first occasion were found worthy of the prize, which on the second was awarded to Barbet, who forcibly advocated the propriety of the operation, and pointed out the cases to which he considered it rationally applicable. If, for instance, a cannon ball, or any other violent contusing cause, had carried off' or crushed the thigh, so as to leave only a few parts to be cut to make the separation complete, he thought a surgeon ought not to hesitate about doing it. Other instances are cited, but I do not think they bear upon the question—the propriety of the operation, with its attendant dangers; the cases portrayed cannot be considered as amputation at the hip-joint. The proceeding, as detailed by this author, seems to me to have no analogy at all to the bloody operation of taking the thigh bone out of the socket; it is quite a different thing when the operator has to cut through parts which bleed profusely, and are endowed with life and sensibility.