The intestinal suture / by Otis K. Newell.

  • Newell, Otis Kimball.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The intestinal suture / by Otis K. Newell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    elder tube, other operators used rolled pasteboard cards, pieces of caudle, cork, swine’s bladder, dried in- testine, and the trachea of an animal. The latter appears to have been the favorite among the materials thus used, and this method received the name of the Suture of the Four Masters, from its hav- ing been used by the four celebrated monks who prac- ticed surgery together at Paris in the middle of the thirteenth century. I may here state that, according to Rydygier, all references to intestinal suture per- formed in early times, are made in regard to trans- verse or longitudinal wounds, as the first recorded re- section with union of completely divided intestine was the operation done by Du verger in 1837. It is use- less to discuss here how the great authorities of dif- ferent times, and contemporaneous operators, differed in regard to the safety of intestinal suture. Scarpa was opposed to every suture, while Jobert, Reybard, Larrey, Lembert and others were in favor of their use. In all the early methods, however, the main idea was to approximate the edges of the wound, in a gen- eral way, so as to give them an opportunity to heal together, but no definite rules were given for uniting them in any particular manner. The great epoch in the history of this operation came in 1826, when Lembert, then an interne in one of the Paris hospitals, and a contemporary of .Jolxrt’s, who was also an interne, declared that in order to ob- tain union of sutured intestinal wounds the great essential was to procure careful apposition of the serous coats, and since then this has been the estab- lished fact upon which the foundation and success of all following methods have been based. Owing to a misprint in the first publication of the method Lam- bert was substituted for Lembert, and hence the fre- quent misquotations made even at the present time.
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