Permanent cure of reducible hernia / by George Hayward ; presented to the American Medical Association, at its session of May, 1852.

  • Hayward, George, 1791-1863.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Permanent cure of reducible hernia / by George Hayward ; presented to the American Medical Association, at its session of May, 1852. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    within the last fifty years, have been of a severe character; some of them dangerous, and in many instances death has been the conse- quence. Cauterization, ligature, sutures, exeision of a part or the ivhole of the sac, and castration were the principal operative methods in use for eighteen hundred years. The object of all of them was to obliterate or contract the neck of the sac, and thus prevent the protrusion of any of the abdominal contents. Cauterization.—The caustic was applied to the skin just over the external ring in inguinal hernia, and immediately below Poupart s ligament in femoral. Sometimes the actual and at others the potential cautery was used. It was not unusual to make several applications of the caustic, so as to destroy the skin, sac, and periosteum in in- guinal hernia, and thus produce an exfoliation of the bone. When the eschar separated, the part was dressed in the same way as a common ulcer. This was the method adopted by the ancients in the performance of this barbarous operation. Monro, and some other practitioners of modern times, modified it by making an inci- sion in the first instance, and exposing the neck of the sac and then applying the caustic. They thought that they thus increased the chance of success, and at the same time lessened the danger. But even when modified in this way the most disastrous results often followed it. The spermatic cord was not unfrequently de- stroyed; the intestine was sometimes perforated; and in many cases death ensued, either from violent and extensive sloughing of the scro- tum, attended with severe constitutional irritation, or from perito- neal inflammation. And, in addition to all this, in several instances in which the patient survived this severe treatment, the hernia re- appeared. It is hardly necessary to add that no one at the present day could probably be found to justify, much less perform, such an operation. It is not, perhaps, surprising that the ancients, in their anxiety to relieve an infirmity which was so common, and over which, from their ignorance of anatomy, they had so little control, should resort to almost any method that held out a tolerable prospect of success- but it is wonderful that, after the repeated failures that followed it as well as its often fatal results, it should have continued in use till modern times. Ligature.—Ligatures were applied in different ways. One of the earliest methods was to pass a string around the integuments over