Introductory lecture, delivered at Netley, on the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Army Medical School, October, 1880 / by T. Longmore.
- Longmore, Sir Thomas, 1816-1895.
- Date:
- 1880
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Introductory lecture, delivered at Netley, on the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Army Medical School, October, 1880 / by T. Longmore. 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.
12/24 page 10
![by contact, or through the air, or by other undiscovered means. True, in the days when hospital gangrene, pyaemia, and septicaemia were common, sometimes terribly destructive, in our military hospitals, the means of prevention were not well understood; but it would be an unjust reflection on the great military surgeons of former days not to acknowledge that the prevention of these septic disorders was the great aim of the remedies which they habitually employed—the main purpose to which all their efforts were directed. And so with Conservative Surgery. If the limb were sacrificed by the military surgeon, was it not to preserve a life which was in jeopardy, either from the nature of the injury, or from the circum- stances under which the patient was placed, or from a consideration of both combined] If the damaged joint were excised, was it not to preserve the limb ] If the shattered bone were treated without the use of the knife, were not the same conservative measures always in view] Is Listerism, supposing the benefits attributed to it to be undoubted, anything more than a further step of improvement in mode of practice] Can it, looking at it particularly from the point of view of the military surgeon, be justly called anything approaching to a revolution in treatment] Let us examine the matter a little more closely. In the treatment of wounds in field practice it has always seemed to me that, leaving on one side the acknowledged necessity for a comprehension of the special features of each particular injury, and a knowledge of the special requirements depending upon its particular nature, every- thing else of importance in the treatment might be summed up under two heads:—purity and repose. Purity of air, purity of all the surroundings of the patient, purity of all local applications, the simplest being generally the best if only pure, and local rest. So far as these essentials could be secured, so far would morbid constitu- tional states be warded off, and local repair quietly and speedily effected. If we could only secure these essentials in the field to the same extent as they are secured in our best civil hospitals, then in field practice we should meet with equally successful results, like injuries with like, as the results obtained in those civil hospitals. But the great difficulty in field practice has always been to obtain even an approach to that amount of purity and repose which such an hospital as the one in which we are now assembled enables the patients placed in it to enjoy. Wounds in the field are usually inflicted on men whose surroundings can nowise be regarded as surgically pure, either at the time they are inflicted, or, as a rule, during their subsequent treatment. The men are wearing the uniforms they have been long toiling in, they are covered with perspiration from exertion and excitement, the air is filled with dust and ddbris caused by the movements of the troops, the tramp](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22307527_0012.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
