On the causes of death after amputation / by Thomas Bryant ; communicated by John Birkett.

  • Thomas Bryant
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the causes of death after amputation / by Thomas Bryant ; communicated by John Birkett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Analysis of Tables B and C. Causes of Death. Pathological amputations.—We will now proceed to the more immediate subject of the causes of death after ampu- tations ; and reviewing the 21 cases of death after patho- logical amputations of the thigh and leg, we find that, analysing the 18 cases of fatal amputations of the thigh, 8, or 44 per cent., died from pyaemia upon the fifth, seventh, eighth, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, and forty-seventh days; 6, or 33 per cent., from exhaustion upon the fourth, eighth, eighth, eighth, twelfth, and nineteenth days re- spectively ; 1 had secondary haemorrhage upon the twelfth day, and died on the twenty-second, with diseased kidneys; 1 sank from diarrhoea upon the twenty-first day; 1 from diarrhoea and phthisis upon the thirtieth ; 1 from hectic upon the twenty-second day. Four of the 8 cases which died from pyaemia, were amputated for acute suppuration of the knee-joint, produced in 2 by the discharge of an abscess into the joint; in the remaining 4 amputation was performed for chronic disease of the joint. Out of the remaining 10 cases of death, 9 were amputations for chronic disease of the knee, and 1 for gan- grene of the leg after ligature of the femoral artery for ruptured aneurism. From the above, it would appear that amputation for acute suppuration of a joint is more frequently followed by pyaemia than amputations for chronic disease. Of the 3 fatal cases of amputations of the leg, 1 died from secondary haemorrhage upon the fifth day; 1 from ex- haustion upon the twenty-fifth day ; 1 from pyaemia upon the ninth day. Reviewing these cases as a whole, and comparing Tables B and C together, we find that, out of the 21 examples of fatal pathological amputation of the lower extremity—
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