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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    divided, and perfect rest is essential for the success of the operation, a house-surgeon should avoid opening up the wound and displacing the hones to look for a small vessel, which pressure and time would prohably treat more satisfactorily. The same may be said of compound fractures, &c. HcBmorrUage after incisions into inflamed imrts.— Incisions will often bleed profusely after a warm poul- tice is applied, as is the general custom in cases of erysi- pelas, carbuncle, &c., and the patient may lose more blood than is either necessary or advisable. The warm ]D0ultice must be immediately taken off and the clotted blood removed, after which strips of lint should be laid in each incision so as to fill it to the sm-face, and a pad of lint be placed over all; a bandage should then be lightly applied, and the limb, if possible, kept in an elevated posture. In three or four hours the bandage and pad may be safely removed, and the poultice re-ap- lied over the strips of lint, which should be allowed to reinain undisturbed until loosened by suppuration. Secondary licemorrhage may occur in any wound when a ligature comes away, from the vessel not having become occluded, or it may result from sloughing having opened up vessels not previously implicated. Another and more formidable variety is where ligature of an arterial trunk has been performed, and haemorrhage occurs at the time when, or soon after, the ligature comes away. Imme- diate arrest of the haemorrhage by pressure upon the main artery is of course the first object, and then, should the -surfaces of the wound or stump be only partially united, an effort may be made to place a ligature upon the bleeding vessel; when, however, as is often the case, the greater part of the womid has healed, the assistance of the visiting surgeon should be at once obtained, since it Avill be a question Avhether the adhesions should be divided and the wound re-opened, or a ligature placed upon the main artery higher up in the limb. Even in