Discourses on the nature and cure of wounds / by John Bell.

  • John Bell
Date:
1800
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Discourses on the nature and cure of wounds / by John Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    510/518 page 234
    again ft general rules, of which our fyftems are very def- titute. The true appearance of thefe cafes is really amufing to a deliberate obferver; and the conclufion, which Ihould be drawn from them, is very obvious. We could, I think, upon an emergency, produce ten or twelve tales of knives cut out from the ftomach fafely,—as many cafes of gangrenous hernias cured,—a hundred wounds of the brain, with great fpoonfuls of it, dif- charged, the perfon continuing very fenfible and wit- ty, and fometimes, as it has been remarked, wittier than before; and moft eafily could we produce a hun- dred good cures by the Casfarean operation, the wo- man being no more hurt than if Ihe had been bled in the arm for a headach. And yet, notwithfhmding all this, no man will believe, that knives are eafy in the ftomach, ftrangulated hernias fafe, or wounds of the brain without danger ; neither fhould Mr. Btlgucr’a, twelve cafes, nor any twelve cafes produced by any other man, induce a furgeon to believe, that gun-fhot wounds, with lacerated arteries and broken bones, are fafe, efpecially if that furgeon have feen (as indeed we fee daily) a patient dying of gangrene, from a luxated ancle, in the very moment in which his furgeons were confulting about cutting off his leg. Such ftrong repeated proteftations, upon this ftngle point, cannot be fuperfluous, when we fee a whole ar- my of furgeons, deputing, as it were, their head fur- geon to fay, In all the Pruftian camps and hofpitals during a whole war, among fix thoufand wounded men we have not cut off one ftngle limb !—indeed.
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