Useful hints to those who are afflicted with ruptures : on the nature, cure, and consequences of the disease, and on the empirical practices of the present day / by T. Sheldrake.

  • Sheldrake, Timothy.
Date:
1803
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Useful hints to those who are afflicted with ruptures : on the nature, cure, and consequences of the disease, and on the empirical practices of the present day / by T. Sheldrake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    nor alter ; such as the age of the patient, the date of the rupture, the thickness of the hernial sac, the size of the abdominal opening, &c. They who arc unacquainted with the true nature of this disease, may possibly be surprised at this assertion, imd be thereby induced to l>elieve, what has in all times been so confideatly asserted, viz. that there are metiiods and medicines whereby the disease may always be per- fectly cured ; and that the surgeons, either through indo- lence will not get information of them, or through ob- stinacy will not practise them. If either of these charges was true, it must be the latter, for we certainly do know %vhat attempts of this kind have been made ; and if any of these means had i-eally deserved the character which has been given of them, had been safel}'^ practicable, or had proved generally successful, I shoul.l certainly have spoken of them in their proper place : but this 'is so iar from being the case, that, on the contrary, however they mav have been applauded by a few individuals, they have, upon re- eated experiment, been fonnd unfit for general practice, eing either totally inefRcacious or painfully mischievous. The majority, nay, almost all they who have submitted to, or tried them, have remained uncurad of their disease, or have been mutilated or murdered in the attempt. Several of these methods have indeed the sanction of antiquity, and have been described, and even practised, by many of the old surgeons. The principal of these, or they which are most won by of notice, are, the cure by cautery ; the cure by caustic ; that by castration ; the punctum aureum ; the royal stitch ; and the cure by incision. In Avicenna, Albucosis,Paulus^gineta,Fab.ab Aqua- pendcnte, Guide do Cauliaco, Sevcrinus, Theodorlc, Ro- landus, Sei-geant Wiseman, and others, will be found the cure by cautery, which is performed as follows : After a proper time spent in fasting and purging, the patient must be put into an erect postme, and by cougiiing, or sneezing, is to make the intestine project in the groin as much as possible, when the piace and circumference of such projection is to be marked out with ink: then the patient being laid on his back, the intestine is to be re- turned fairly into the belly, and a red hot caustic is to be applied according to the extent of the marked Hue. For this purpose, cauteries of different sizes, shapes, and figures, have been devised ; anular, elliptical, circular, like the Greek letter, gamma, &c. The writers who have given an account