A manual of minor surgery and bandaging : for the use of house-surgeons, dressers and junior practitioners / by Christopher Heath.

  • Christopher Heath
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    190/280 (page 166)
    IGG be found to be too large, owing to the natural subsidence of the swelling; and it will be necessary to split open the case again, and, having pared the edges to the re- quisite amount, to re-apjily it with a li'esh external bandage. The gi-eat 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 shrunlc, and this precaution will be as well for all the bandages used with the starch. M. Seutin avoids the use of the first dry bandage by emplojdng cotton-wool smeared with starch, in which the limb is wrapped, and this has the advantage of becom'ing com- pressed by the contracting bandages outside it, and thus giiards the limb from injurious pressure. The house- surgeon must exercise the most vigilant care, for the first forty-eight hoi;rs after applying the starch bandage, that no such pressure occur, and must not scruple to cut the whole apparatus aAvay, if the extremities of the Kmbs show the least sjnnptom of it, or if the patient com- plains of feeUng great constriction. Cliallh-and-gum bandage is aj^jilied in exactly the same way as the starch bandage. The adhesive mixture is made by adding boiling water to equal parts of gi;m arable and precipitated chalk ; and this material has the advantages over the starch, both of becoming firm sooner, and of havmg more strength, so that the addition of strips of pasteboard is rarely necessary. Plaster-of-Faris handage.—The plaster for this pur- pose should be the fine white powder used by modellers ; and must not be old, or it will have become deteriorated by the absorjition of moisture. There are two Avays of ap]5lying the bandage. First method.—Taking a loosely woven bandage (the