Body-snatching.

Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Body-snatching. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    musket bullet in his left leg, a little above the knee, when extraction of the ball, or amputation of the limb, says his biographer, ^' would have saved his inestimable life : but the surgeons and physicians were unwilling to practice the one, and knew not how to perform the other. He was variously tormented by a number of surgeons and physicians for three weeks. Amputation indeed was never attempted except where mortification had itself half performed the operation. The just apprehension of an hemorrhage which there was no adequate means of stopping, checked the hand of the boldest surgeon, and quailed the courage of the most daring patient—and if ever the operation was re- sorted to, it almost always proved fatal: the patient generally expired, according to the expression of Celsus, ** in ipso opere How could it be otherwise ? The surgeon cut through the flesh of his patient with a red hot knife: this was his only means of stopping the hemorrhage : by this expedient he sought to con- vert the whole surface of the stump into an eschar: but this operation, painful in its execution, and terri- ble in its consequences, when it even appeared to suc- ceed, succeeded only for a few days ; for the bleeding generally returned and proved fatal as soon as the sloughs or dead parts became loose. Plunging the stump into boiling oil, into boiling turpentine, into boiling pitch, for all these means were used, was at- tended with no happier result, and after unspeakable suffering, almost every patient perished. In the man- ner in which amputation is performed at present, not more than one person in twenty loses his life in conse- quence of the operation, even taking into the account all the cases in which it is practised in hospitals. In private practice, where many circumstances favour its success, it is computed that 95 persons out of 100 re- cover from it, when it is performed at a proper time,, and in a proper manner. It seems impossible to exhibit a more striking illustration of the great value of anatomical knov/]eds:e=
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