Injuries and diseases of the jaws : the Jacksonian prize essay of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1867 / By Christopher Heath, edited by Henry Percy Dean.

  • Heath, Christopher, 1835-1905.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Injuries and diseases of the jaws : the Jacksonian prize essay of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1867 / By Christopher Heath, edited by Henry Percy Dean. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    of a troublesome character may be produced. Unavoidable accidents of this kind have on several occasions been made the ground for legal proceedings against the operator; but most unfairly so, since the exercise of the greatest skill and care cannot on all occasions prevent mishaps due to the natural conformation of the parts. Mr. James Salter, in his valuable work on Dental Pathology and Surgery (1874), devotes a chapter to The casualties which may arise in the operations of tooth- extraction, in which he mentions that, in extracting an incisor tooth from the upper jaw, the whole mass of bone corresponding to the intermaxillary bones broke away, and was merely held in place by the soft tissues. Fortunately the bone reunited without an untoward symptom. Mr. Salter also refers to a case in which a most able operator broke the horizontal ramus of the lower jaw completely through, in extracting a tooth with the forceps. Gunshot injuries to the face may produce the most ter- rible injuries of the lower jaw, by splintering and removing large portions of it; and the mere explosion of gunpowder in its immediate neighbourhood, as when a pistol is fired into the mouth by a would-be suicide, will produce a fracture of the bone. (See chapter on Gunshot Injuries.) Fractures of the lower jaw are remarkable from the fact that they are almost always compound towards the mouth, though the skin is rarely involved except in gunshot injuries. The fibrous tissue of the gum being very inelastic, tears readily when the bone is broken across, and thus the saliva and the air come in contact with the fractured surfaces. Examples have been described, however, where the presence of fracture was discovered without injury either to the perios- teum or the mucous membrane. When the ramus, or still more when the coronoid process or condyle is broken, the bone is too deeply seated for injury to extend into the mouth. Position of tlic Fracture.—Fracture may occur at various points in the lower jaw, and the hocly of the bone is that most frequently injured (in fifty-two out of fifty-five cases