First aid in illness and injury; Medicine, Popular
There are a few surgical principles that should be impressed upon your
mind before the subject of treatment is taken up. The first and most
important of these is that it requires a great deal more loss of blood
than is popularly supposed to endanger life. There is no danger from
hemorrhage from a vein and but little from any of the smaller arteries.
The free flow of blood from a wound instead of being alarming is the
most beneficial thing that can happen. The cleansing power of flowing
blood cannot be overestimated and it is cleansing that all wounds
require. That brings up a second thought. All serious consequences
arising from incised or punctured wounds come from the invasion of
bacteria, and all your efforts should be directed against these
energetic little gentlemen, either those that have already entered the
wound or those that are striving to gain ingress.
A simple cut will, if permitted to seal itself up in its own blood,
generally heal without any further interference. The man who puts
tobacco, flour, soap, or any other of the popular monstrosities on a
wound is little short of a criminal.
While, theoretically, many people know that blood flowing in a steady
stream is coming from a vein and that flowing in jets or spurts
is coming from an artery, few know how to take advantage of that
knowledge. The general rule to make pressure between the heart and the
wound in case of a jet and between the wound and the extremity in case
of a stream is only good as a general rule; there are exceptions and
it is exceptions that make the rule dangerous. There are times when it
becomes necessary to reverse the process.
The proper way is to make compression with your fingers until you
have located the region the blood comes from; then apply your steady
compression in that locality. There are a few great arterial trunks
that lie near the surface and may become injured, the injury causing
death from hemorrhage. The manner of locating the compression point for
these arteries will be given.
The first of these is the great artery that runs down the inside of the
leg, called the femoral. Bleeding from this vessel will result in death
in a very few minutes, and it has been known to be severed by a man
falling on his sheath knife. The bleeding may be controlled by grasping
the leg with the fingers near the body. About half way down the inner
surface of the leg the fingers will fall into a slight depression, at
the bottom of which lies the femoral artery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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