Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 707, July 14, 1877Various
History
Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 707, July 14, 1877
Various
Periodicals
A medical gentleman at one time resident in China furnishes the
following notes of interesting incidents within his knowledge. Though
roughly put together, they may amuse our readers and be relied on as
true.
In the month of January 1869, at about half-past seven P.M., I was
sitting at dinner in my house in Swatow, when a sailor from the small
gun-boat at that time in Swatow Harbour came running breathless and
hatless, asking me to come down without any delay to the hospital,
which I had built in the Chinese town on the side of the river opposite
my own house. This man said there were thirteen sailors and the captain
of the gun-boat badly wounded by an unprovoked attack of the Chinese.
This looked serious indeed; so putting up instruments, lint, &c. I
hastened down with the sailor. On reaching the hospital, the unwounded
men of the gun-boat were still carrying into the hospital their injured
comrades. I never saw a set of men so severely wounded without any
being fatally so. I set to work, and extracted fifteen bullets from
the men; but some were too deeply imbedded to get at that night. One
man had one ear shot off, a second two fingers, a third was hit in
the eye, a fourth shot in the breast, and I afterwards extracted the
bullet at his back. The captain of the gun-boat had on a very thick
shaggy pilot-coat, double on the breast; a bullet had cut right across
his chest; and on examination I found the skin just raised where it
had passed. A very singular wound was that of a young officer, whose
two front teeth were knocked in by a bullet, that then disappeared
somewhere in his palate. I never could find this bullet whilst he was
under my care; but it seemed not to have done him much harm. He left
Swatow; and I saw him three or four years later, and he said the lead
had never appeared, and he had suffered no inconvenience from it. I
believe it must have worked itself somewhere into the muscles at the
back of his neck.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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