Antiseptic surgery : its principles, practice, history and results / by W. Watson Cheyne.
- Watson Cheyne
- Date:
- 1882
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Antiseptic surgery : its principles, practice, history and results / by W. Watson Cheyne. Source: Wellcome Collection.
104/656 page 76
![vessel, I have seen the following method adopted by Mr. Lister:—In removing some cancerous glands from the axilla, a small vein was torn away from the axillary vein at their junction, making practically a longitudinal rent in the axillary vein. Taking a fine curved needle and the finest catgut, he stitched up the rent hy the glover's suture. The patient recovered without the slightest bad symptom. There was no pain in the wound, nor swelling of the arm, &c. In another case, where the longitudinal sinus was injured in trephining the skull, the wound was plugged with catgut, and the patient recovered without any untoward symptom. The drainage of an aseptic wound is the point next in im- portance to keeping the wound aseptic. For if the blood and serum which collect in the in- terior of the wound within the first twenty-four or forty-eight hours do not get free exit, they give rise to tension, and tension gives rise to inflammation, and the latter, if allowed to go on long enough, to suppm'ation; and Fig. 255.-ANOTHER method op thus the rapid healing of the TYING VESSELS IN DENSE TISSUES, wouud is prcveutcd, though the (Prom Esmarcii.) patient is uot as a rule subjected to any danger to life. To avoid these consequences ]VIr. Lister has paid very special attention to the drainage of wounds. There are two main ways in which this may be done—drainage through tubes, or drainage by capillarity. The former is the most universally applicable and the most certainly successful. Drainage by means of tubes is that fii'st used by IVIr. Lister, and, as just stated, is the form of drainage which is most uni- versally applicable. The tubes generally employed are the india-rubber tubes introduced by Chassaignac, though of late the kind of rubber has been altered, that now used being red rubber, which contains no free sulphur. By the use of these red rubber tubes disagreeable smells and blackening of the protective, which often occurred when the black tubes contain- ing free sulphur were employed, are avoided. These tubes have round holes cut in them at short intervals, the diameter of each](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20409928_0104.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
