On the study of surgery : an address ... delivered at University College, London, at the opening of session 1850-1851 / [John Eric Erichsen].

  • Erichsen, John Eric, 1818-1896
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the study of surgery : an address ... delivered at University College, London, at the opening of session 1850-1851 / [John Eric Erichsen]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    -L <v examined, show you how mutually dependent; how inse¬ parably connected the two branches of practice are, and how their circles cross at many points. The broken thigh; the ulcerated leg, the strangled gut, are, doubtless, purely surgical cases, as exclusively so as any you can possibly have to treat; and yet, in conducting these to a proper termination and cure, your treatment may have fully as much to do with constitutional or visceral, or, in other words, with purely medical disease, as with the local malady. Take the instance of the compound fracture of the thigh. The fracture is reduced, the broken ends of bone carefully laid in apposition, and the limb neatly and comfortably put up in splints, which you may scarcely have occasion to disturb once a week during the treatment of the case. But does the Surgeon’s business end here ? Does all his anxiety depend in maintaining the broken bone in a proper position ? If so, he would have but little disquiet; for he knows that by keeping the injured part of a sufficient length and proper shape, by very simple mechanical contrivances, for a definite time, nature will firmly solder together the broken fragments, and a sound, and straight, and useful member, will result. But the patient has been habitually living above par, taking more stimulus, and leading a freer life than is prudent or right. On the third or fourth night after the accident, the surgeon finds that the pulse has become quick and irritable, the tongue coated, the skin moist and clammy, that his patient is wakeful, suspicious of those around him, irritable and talkative, and at last becomes furiously delirious. He now knows that he has been seized with that disease, which, in the surgical words, we call “ Traumatic Delirium,” but which, in the medical words, you will meet under the name of “Delirium Tremens;” not excited, it is true, by a broken bone acting injuriously on an irritable and shattered system, but by some internal source of irritations, loaded bowels, or the effects of a severe debauch, operating on a similar constitution, and producing similar effects, to be met by the same