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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    and 1650. At this time the shot used with the fire-arms carried by the troops had fixed weights and sizes. The common musket, still a matchlock, had 10 bullets to the pound, the arquebus 17 to the pound, the flintlock carbine 24 to the pound. Pistols were also in use with long barrels, and carrying shot about 20 to the pound. The writer next to Wiseman of importance in England on gunshot wounds was the illustrious John Hunter. Sir E. Home, in his account of the life of his brother-in-law, John Hunter, mentions that he went with the army to Belle-Isle as a staff- surgeon ; that he served, while the war continued, as senior surgeon on the staff, both in Belle-Isle and Portugal, till the year 1763 ; and that it was at this time he acquired his experience of gunshot wounds. Hunter himself mentions that he arranged his ‘Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds,’ at Belle-Isle, after the reduction of the place. The ammunition used by the troops at this time appears to have undergone no other change, so far as the projectiles were concerned, than a small amount of diminution in their weight. The gunpowder and musket had been improved in various ways. The flintlock was used universally instead of the matchlock. The infantry soldier was disencumbered of various articles of equip- ment which he had previously carried, and his arms were now confined to the smooth-bore musket of *75 inch bore, weighing together with the bayonet a little over 12 lbs. The bullets were apparently of the same sizes as those in use at the beginning of the present century, viz., some nominally 14J to the pound, vary- ing from 480 to 488 grains, with a diameter of '695 inch ; and others weighing about 574 grains, with a diameter of *745 inch. The charge of gunpowder was 6 drachms. Leaden bullets were made in Hunter’s time, and for many years afterwards,21 by being cast in moulds. They were scarcely ever free from minute air-bubble spaces, owing to the lead being bulkier in the molten than in the solid state, and to the exterior becoming cooled before the substance within. From the fact just mentioned, and from impurities in the lead, it scarcely ever happened that bullets were of the same density throughout. This and various other causes, some of which will be noticed hereafter, caused the bullets discharged from muskets to be very irregular in their flight, their rate of velocity to be very low, and the dis- tance to which they were capable of travelling very limited. The same fire-arm and projectile continued in general use among the British troops, without any improvement of note, during the Peninsular campaigns from 1808 to 1814, in the cam- paign of 1815, during the American war between 1812 and 1814, and in the numerous battles in which British troops were engaged in the East Indies. The smooth-bore musket in use during this