Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A treatise on gunshot wounds / by T. Longmore. 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.)
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![have been fallacious. Portions of uniform and accouter- menta have been torn away by cannon-balls without injury to the soldier himself. Even hair from the head has been Bhaved ofT, and cases are on record where the external ear and end of the nose have been carried away without further mischief. The true explanation of the appearances presented in those cases which were formerly called wind contusions, appears to rest in the peculiar direction, the degree of obliquity, with which the missile impinges on the elastic skin, together with the situation of the structures injured beneath the surface, relatively to the weight and momentum of the ball on one side, and hard resisting substances on the other. Thus, in the case of a cannon-ball passing across the abdomen, as in two instances mentioned by Sir Gilbert Blane, where men were killed by the passage of balls across the epigastrium, the elasticity of the skin probably enabled that structure to yield to the strain to which it was exposed, while viscera were ruptured by the projectile forcing them against the vertebral column. So the weight of a ball pass- ing obliquely over a forearm may possibly crush the bone between itself and some hard substance against which the arm may be accidentally resting, without lesion of the inter- posed skin. ]3aron Larrcy, who examined many fatal cases of this kind, relates that he always found so much internal disorganization as to leave no doubt in his mind of its being the result of contact with the ball. lie explained the ab- sence of superficial lesion, by the surface having been struck by cannon-balls in the latter part of their flight, when they had undergone a change of direction from straight to curvi- linear, and acquired a revolving motion, owing to atmo- spheric' resistance and the effect of gravitation. In such a condition, he argued, they would turn round a part of the body, as a wheel passes over a limb, in place of forcing their way through it; and, while elastic structures would](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21137560_0037.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
