On acupressure in amputations : with illustrative cases / by J.Y. Simpson.

  • Simpson, James Young, 1811-1870.
Date:
[1860]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On acupressure in amputations : with illustrative cases / by J.Y. Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ON ACUPRESSURE IN AMPUTATIONS; WITH ILLUSTRATIVE CASES. BY J. Y. SIMPSON, M.D., PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AND MIDWIFERY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. [REPRINTED FROM THE MEDICAL TIMES AND GAZETTE, FEB. 11, I860.] “ Come, lay aside your stitchery.”—Coriolanus. If after amputation of a limb any British Hospital Surgeon at the present day were, for the purpose of arresting haemorrhage from the bleeding stump, to sear its raw surface over with red-hot irons, or besmear it with boiling pitch or turpentine, or apply to it potential caustics, the practice would be regarded as cruel and outrageous in the highest degree. Yet when Pare, in 1564, proposed in amputa¬ tions the ligature of the bleeding vessels as a substitute for these cauteries and caustics, he was bitterly denounced and decried by most of his contemporaries; the French Parliament was petitioned to sup¬ press the publication and dissemination of his doctrines ; and the Surgeons of the great Hospital at the Hotel Dieu of Paris—the city in which Pare himself lived and practised—still continued, a century and a half afterwards, to use, as we learn from Dionis, in 1707, the vitriol button—a form of potential caustic, instead of the ligature, in all their amputations. And half a century later, Mr. Sharpe, Surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, when writing in 1661, found it necessary, in his well-known work entitled, u A Critical Inquiry into the Present State of Surgery” in England, formally to advocate the employment of the ligature for the arrest of haemorrhage from wounded arteries, in preference to styptics or the cautery, on the ground that “ it was not