Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689): his life and original writings / [edited by] Kenneth Dewhurst.

  • Thomas Sydenham
Date:
1966
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689): his life and original writings / [edited by] Kenneth Dewhurst. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    32/222 (page 12)
    sending a raiding party into Weymouth where they burned down several houses. Both sides then tried to build up overwhelming forces. From Poole Sydenham got two hundred and eighty men by sea, and a hundred cavalry by land. Strengthened by troops from Lord Goring's Dorchester garrison, the Royalists decided to take Melcombe by storm but, as Goring drew up his troops for the attack, Sydenham fired enemy shipping in the port and burned down several houses. These diversions, accompanied by an intense Parliamentary bombardment, caused the attack to be postponed. The contest again lapsed into a stalemate. The Battle of Weymouth saw two of the foremost medical men of the seventeenth century unwittingly opposing each other across the narrow strip of water which separates the twin towns. Thomas Sydenham, then a cavalry officer, but destined to become the leading British physician, was in Melcombe, while Richard Wiseman, Surgeon to a Royalist Foot regiment in Weymouth, later became the foremost practical surgeon in England. They were both kept busy: Sydenham leading cavalry raids and Wiseman treating casualties. The latter mentioned attending a soldier who by the grazing of a canon shot, had the fore-part of his head carried off, yet he survived for seventeen days until he fell into a Spasmus and dyed, houling like a dog, as most of those do who have been so wounded. 1 Wiseman also treated a maid with a head wound who lived until the brain was wrought out or corrupted; 2 and a soldier shot through the heel whose severe haemorrhage he successfully controlled with cautery after other methods had failed. But the surgeon's most detailed description con cerned the amputation of a soldier's hand. I was called at break of day to an Irish-man [he wrote], of Lieutenant Coll. Ballard's Regment, who in shooting offhis musquet, brake and tore his hand to pieces after a strange manner: I purposed to cut off his hand; I sent presently to my quarters to one of my Servants to bring a saw, and knife, and dressing, of which at these times we had always stores, which being brought, I took a red ribbon from my case of Lancets, and bound upon his Arm some four fingers above the Carpus, and cutting the flesh, bared the bones of their membrane; I divided the flesh between the bones, and setting the saw close to the flesh above, I sawed it off, and untied my Ligature above, and bringing down the musculous flesh and skin over the end of the bone, not making any cross-stitch, have drest up that stump with my Restrictives, and rouled him up, and returned again to my quarters. I had not been an hower gone, but I was sent for again to this Irish-soldier, he being as the messenger said grievously full of pain; I wondered at it, and hastened away, before I came to his hut, I heard him crying, I asked him what he ailed to roar so, it was a while before he would answer me, 1 Richard Wiseman, A Treatise of Wounds (1672), p. 134. 2 Ibid.