Critical remarks upon the misstatements as to interdental splints in the surgical treatise of Professor D. Hayes Agnew, M.D. / by Thomas Brian Gunning.

  • Gunning, Thomas Brian, -1889.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Critical remarks upon the misstatements as to interdental splints in the surgical treatise of Professor D. Hayes Agnew, M.D. / by Thomas Brian Gunning. 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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    letters cut away, and your description leads the reader to suppose that a band of metal goes under the chin to hold the jaw up in the splint, and that metal bands are used instead of strings of tape to hold the splint by means of the cap and to keep a metal band from slipping over the chin. But no metal band is used anywhere nor spoken of by me. In the absence of teeth, the wings are used, two on each side, the upper range over the malar bones and the lower along the jaw ; and from the cap on the head, tape strings pass down on each side to the upper wings and hold the splint against the upper gum, while the broken lower jaw is held up in the splint by a single thickness of linen or other thin material, which extends across under the chin from one lower wing to the other, while the lips, cheeks and all the face are left free from pressure. This statement would place the splint plainly before your readers, and give them the use of it, for their patients, when they needed or preferred it. This description is also briefer than your deceptive text. Certainly this splint, No. 3 (your figure, 644), deserves fair notice, it having been successfully used on the bad fractures of the Hon. Win. H. Seward subsequent to the attempt to assassinate him. Surgeon General Barnes and Surgeon Basil Norris, of the army, together with Dr. Whelan, chief of the medical bureau of the navy, and others, had signally failed to secure by ligatures and bandages the fractures received in falling from his carriage, before the Secretary was cut so terribly on the night that President Lincoln was killed. Further, I did not take charge of the case nor set the fractures until twenty-five days after the accident, fifteen after the attempt to kill him ; yet this splint with upper wings held the double and com- pound fractures of the jaw securely for sixty-eight days without a moment’s intermission. I described this splint, No. 3, to the New York Academy of Med- icine, June 1, I864, but the upper wings were never used until I Since then a severe fracture without a tooth in the mouth has been Fig. 644.