Gunshot wounds and other injuries of nerves / by S. Weir Mitchell, George R. Morehouse, and William W. Keen.

  • Silas Weir Mitchell
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gunshot wounds and other injuries of nerves / by S. Weir Mitchell, George R. Morehouse, and William W. Keen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    14/172
    medical history has there been collected for study and treatment so remarkable a series of nerve in- juries. To this genera] remark there are but two excep- tions. In a year of this vast experience of wounds of nerves, paralyses, and epilepsies, we have not witnessed a single death, so that thus far no oppor- tunity for the study of pathological anatomy has been presented. The great bulk of our patients has consisted of men who have been shifted from one hospital to another, and whose cases have been the despair of their surgical attendants. As the wounded of each period of the war have been cured, discharged, in- valided, or died, every large hospital has had left among the wards two or three or more strange in- stances of wounds of nerves. Most of them presented phenomena which are rarely seen, and which were naturally foreign to the observation even of those surgeons whose experience was the most extensive and complete. Nowhere were these cases described at length in the text-books, and, except in a single untranslated French book, their treatment was passed over in silence; while even in the volume in question but a limited class of nerve lesions was discussed. In the great monographs on military surgery, this defect is still so complete, that wounds of nerves are there related rather as curiosities and as matters for despair, than with any view to their full clinical study and systematic treatment. When a number of cases were collected in our own wards, the want of some guide to treatment became manifest, and it was only after a long