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.

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    be necessary to plug one nostril for a time to keep the septum in its place. Great care should be taken to injure the mucous membrane as little as possible. Fractured loiner jaw, in hospital practice, is generally the result of a blow with the fist, and seldom of a fall, though the patient may assign the latter as the cause of the accident. Care should be taken to examine all the teeth, to see that a tooth has not di'opped into the fissure between the broken portions, as sometimes happens, par- ticularly in the molar region. If the fracture is near the symphysis, it is advisable to pass a piece of stout silk round the adjacent teeth so as to bind the fracture together, but this cannot be accomplished far back in the mouth. The wedges of cork, &c., which are recommended, are, as far as my experience goes, unnecessary and useless, since they cannot long be kept in position, and then roll about the mouth, to the patient's great annoyance. It has been recommended to mould pasteboard or gutta percha to the jaw externally, so as to form a sphnt for it, but in the majority of cases the following bandage alone will be found quite sufiicient and satisfactory treatment. A bandage, three inches Avide and a yard long, should have a sHt fom- inches long cut in the centre of it, an inch from the edge, and the ends of the bandage should be split to within a couple of mches of the former slit, thus forming a foiu'-tailed bandage with a hole in the middle. The central slit can now be adapted to the chin, the narrow po];tion going in front of the lower Up, and the broader beneath the jaw; and the two tads cor- responding to the upper part of the bandage are then to be tied round the nape of the neck, Avhile the others are crossed over them and carried over the top of the head.* In bad cases of double fracture, a metal ' plate' lined with gutta-percha, and fitted by a dentist upon the teeth, is the most satisfactory mode of treatment.