A Treatise on Gunshot WoundsLongmore, T. (Thomas), Sir
History
A Treatise on Gunshot Wounds
Longmore, T. (Thomas), Sir
Gunshot wounds
and that in these instances the patients were subsequently subject
to occasional headache and vertigo; and in the French report, by Dr
Scrive, it is stated that trephining was for the most part fatal in
its results in the French army. In siege operations, the experience as
regards wounds of the head is always very extensive, the lower parts
of the body being so much more protected in the trenches. According to
Dr. Scrive’s returns, one of every three men killed in the trenches
before Sebastopol, and one in every 3·4 wounded, was injured in this
region. In the English returns, wounds of the head and face in the men
are shown as 19·3 per cent.; in the officers, as 15 per cent.; but this
is of the total wounded in the field as well as in the trenches. There
was, therefore, as extensive a range for observation of the effects of
trephining in the siege of Sebastopol as is likely to happen in any
war. Dr. Stromeyer, who in the early part of his professional career
resorted to trephining in complicated fractures of the skull, records,
in his Principles of Military Surgery, that he has abandoned the
practice. After the battle of Kolding, in Sleswick, in 1849, there were
eight gunshot fractures of the skull, with depression, and more or less
cerebral symptoms. In all these, with one exception, the detachment
of the fractures was left to nature, and all recovered. One patient,
from whom some fragments were removed on the seventh day, was placed in
considerable danger by the treatment, and Dr. Stromeyer resolved never
to adopt it again. In 1850, in Sleswick, two young surgeons came under
Dr. Stromeyer’s care with gunshot wounds of the head, accompanied by
deep depression; they were both treated without trephining, and both
recovered. Throughout the three campaigns of the Sleswick–Holstein war,
there was only one case of trephining which gave a favorable result.
Military experience makes it difficult to understand the frequent
and successful performance of trepanning by the older surgeons for
such slight causes as they performed it, excepting that the patients
labored under little else than the effects of the operation itself,
while very fatal mischief has existed in addition in those instances in
which the operation has been resorted to for accidents from gunshot. A
circumstance quoted by Sir G. Ballinghall particularly illustrates the
favorable results of abstaining from trephining in some cases. After
the battle of Talavera, a hospital which had been established in the
town had to be suddenly abandoned, and an order was given for all the
wounded who could march to leave it. There was no time for selection,
and among those who marched were twelve or fourteen men with wounds
of the head, in which the cranium was implicated, four or five having
both tables fractured, and two having the globe of one eye destroyed
along with fracture of the os frontis. All these men recovered, though
they were sixteen days on the march, harassed and exposed to a burning
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