A Treatise on Gunshot WoundsLongmore, T. (Thomas), Sir
History
A Treatise on Gunshot Wounds
Longmore, T. (Thomas), Sir
Gunshot wounds
A small layer of metal, like a portion of one of the coats of an
onion, occasionally becomes detached from a leaden bullet, and lodges.
The writer was once applied to by a discharged soldier, suffering
from some troublesome granulations at the bottom of the left orbit.
The globe of the eye had been destroyed nearly two years before by
a musket–ball shot from above, which, after traversing the orbit,
had descended, and was excised from the right side of the neck. On
examining the granulations by a probe, the point came into contact
with a hard substance, which further examination showed to be a small
projecting point of lead. It proved to be a scale from the bullet
which had caused the original wound, being equal in length to half
its circumference, and in width, at the broadest part, about a third
of the same dimension. It retained the curved form of the bullet from
which it had been detached. The following case shows that similar
sections may be separated from cylindro–conical as well as from round
bullets. An officer of the 41st Regiment was struck in the Crimea by
a conical bullet, which destroyed the forearm in such a manner as to
necessitate amputation below the elbow. Secondary hemorrhage occurred
on the eleventh day, and on the following day the stump was opened and
examined. “While searching for the bleeding vessel, a slice of the
bullet, about the size of a worn sixpence, was found deeply imbedded
in the muscle.” In the case of a soldier of the 19th Regiment, who was
wounded before Sebastopol in the loin by a conical bullet, which was
discharged per anum, and who died in Guy’s Hospital of albuminuria,
nearly four years afterward, a small scale of lead from the bullet was
found at the post–mortem examination fixed in the spleen. Strange to
say, in this instance the lodgment did not appear to have excited any
inflammatory action or mischief.
Lodgment of small foreign bodies, angular pieces of metal, as slugs,
nails, and others, and of soft textures, as shreds of linen or
woolen cloth, often give rise to much inconvenience. The track of a
musket–ball may be prevented from healing, and a troublesome sinus
formed, by such small fibers of cloth as would hardly attract notice if
within means of observation. Although a wound be closed, and apparently
healed, if any shreds of cloth remain, it will probably open from time
to time, when small fibers may be noticed in the discharge; and this
will continue until the whole is thus got rid of. The probability of
cloth entering a wound with the conical ball is not so great as it was
with the spherical ball, which not unfrequently tore out a little cap,
as it were, of cloth in its passage. This is another result of its
shape and velocity. John Hunter and others make mention of circular
pieces of the skin being cut out by bullets, and then lodging, and
acting as foreign bodies in the wounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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