An essay on the treatment of compound and complicated fractures : being the annual address before the Massachusetts Medical Society, in Boston, U.S. America, May 28, 1845 / by William J. Walker.

  • Walker, William J. (William Johnson), 1789-1865.
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the treatment of compound and complicated fractures : being the annual address before the Massachusetts Medical Society, in Boston, U.S. America, May 28, 1845 / by William J. Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/104 (page 15)
    dilatation of gun-shot wounds: and Le Dran announces his judgment in the following words. ‘Whenever, in case of a gun-shot wound, the surgeon foresees the indispensable necessity of amputation, he should do it at once.’ While such was the opinion of these distin¬ guished men, the French Royal Academy of Surgery, in the year 1754, proposed the following question for a medal: ^ ‘ In what cases is it neces¬ sary to perform amputation immediately, and in what to defer it ? ’ The prize was awarded to M. Faure, a military surgeon, for an essay which maintained that amputation should only be performed after the subsidence of the first symp¬ toms, and the establishment of suppuration. Faure based his opinions on the results which he had seen of early and deferred amputation, as practiced on the wounded after the great battle of Fontenoy, which took place, May 11th, 1745. He states these results to be, that scarcely thirty escaped after early amputation, out of more than three hundred operated on; while of ten, amputated after the first symptoms had subsided, all recovered. Some time subsequently, John Hunter and O’Halloran, in England, embraced the same views. pieces of their clothes, bombast, linnen, paper, pieces of maiile or armour, bullets, haileshot, splinters of bone, bruised flesh, and the like : All which must be plucked forth with as much celerity and gentleness as may be. For presently after the receiving of the wound, the paine and inflammation are not so great as they will be within a short time after.—Ambrose ParL Page 419. * En quels cas il fallait faire l’amputation sur le champ, et en quels eas il fallait la difierer.—Prix de l ’ Academie de V amU 1754.