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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![Shock.—When a bone is shattered, a cavity penetrated, an important viscus wounded, a limb carried away by a round shot, pain is not bo prominent a symptom as the genera] perturbation and alarm which supervene on the in- jury. This is generally described as the shock of a gun- shot wound. The patient trembles and totters, is pale, complains of being faint, perhaps vomits. His features ex- press anxiety and distress. This emotion is in great measure instinctive; it is witnessed in the horse hit mortally in action, no less than in his rider; it is sympathy of the whole frame with a part subjected to serious injury, expressed through the nervous system. Examples seem to show that it may occasionally be overpowered for a time, even in most severe injuries, by mental and nervous action of another kind; but this can rarely happen when the injury is a vital one. Panic may lead to similar results when the wound is of a less serious nature. A soldier, having his thoughts carried away from himself—his whole frame stimulated to the utmost height of excitement by the continued scenes and circumstances of the fight—when he feels himself wounded, is suddenly recalled to a sense of personal danger; and if he be seized with doubt whether his wound is mortal, depression as low as his excitement was high may immediately follow. This will happen according to individual character and intelligence, State of health, and other circumstances. For while, on the one hand, numerous examples occur in every action of men walking to the field hospital for assistance almost unsup- ported, and with comparatively little signs of distress, after the loss of an arm or other such severe injury; on the other, men whose wounds are slight in proportion are quite over- come, and require to be carried. As a general rule, however, the graver the injury, the greater and mure persistent is the amount of shock. A rifle-bullet which splits up a long bone into many longitudi- nal fragments, inflicts a very much more serious injury than the ordinary fracture effected by the ball from a smooth-bore](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21137560_0049.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
