A manual of minor surgery and bandaging for the use of house surgeons, dressers and junior practitioners.

  • Christopher Heath
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of minor surgery and bandaging for the use of house surgeons, dressers and junior practitioners. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    it will be necessary to split open the case again, and, having pared the edges to the requisite amount, to re- apply it with a fresh external bandage. The great difficulty in using this apparatus will be found to be the dangerous and unbearable constriction of the limb, caused by the shrinking of the first dry bandage. This, I believe, may be advantageously dis- pensed with altogether ; or, if employed, care should be taken to use a bandage which has been washed and thoroughly shrunk, and this x^rccaution will be as well for all tlie bandages used with the starch. M. Seutin avoids the use of the first dry bandage, by employing cotton wool smeared with starch, in which the limb is wrapped, and this has the advantage of becoming com- pressed by the contracting bandages outside it, and thus guarding the limb from injurious pressui'e. The house-surgeon must exercise the most vigilant care, for the first forty-eight hours after applying the starch bandage, that no such ]iressure occurs, and must not scruple to cut the whole apparatus away, if the ex- tremities of the limbs show the least symptom of it, or if the patient complains of feeling great constric- tion. Chalk-and-fjim hcmdage is applied in exactl}- the same way as the starch bandage. The adhesive mix- ture is made by adding boiling water to equal parts of gum arabic and precipitated chalk ; and this mate- rial has the advantages over the starch, both of be- coming firm sooner, and of having more strength, so that the addition of strips of pasteboard is rarely necessary. Plaster-of-Paris Icmdar/e. — The plaster for this purpose should be the iiue white powder used by modellers ; and must not be old, or it Avill have become deteriorated by the absorption of moisture. There arc two ways of applying the bandage. rirst method.—Taking a loosely woven bandage (the