A handy-book of forensic medicine and toxicology / by W. Bathurst Woodman and Charles Meymott Tidy.

Date:: 1877

Credit: A handy-book of forensic medicine and toxicology / by W. Bathurst Woodman and Charles Meymott Tidy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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$by the bullet— in fact, it would rub off a small bluish portion of lead. Small instruments, like gimlets and cheese-tasters, have been devised to scrape or screw out a bit of the bullet. And most ingenious of all, as it is applicable to iron or any kind of metallic ball or foreign-body, is an electric, or rather galvanic, “ bullet-detector,” which rings a small bell as soon as a circuit is formed by the bullet connecting the poles of the apparatus. The late Surgeon Major Wyatt published a paper on the detection of bullets in the “ British Medical Journal ” for 1870.* The best treatment of gunshot-wounds is not within the scope of a work like this. Incidentally we may, however, mention, that the cold-water treatment of the Val de Gfrdce Hospital of Paris in 1848, the use of ice by Esmarch, and Stromeyer—frequent irrigation, and antiseptic treatment appear to be jnost in favour with military surgeons. The dangers of gunshot wounds are, however, strictly within our province. We cannot always judge of these at first. They may of course prove instantly or rapidly fatal by lucinorrhage, shock, syncope, and the like. But the chief danger is when suppuration has been established. The sloughs become detached and involve the whole track—though generally most near the entrance, where there has been most bruising. When these sloughs separate, bones, joints, arteries, cavities, and canals, and nerves, may be exposed which previously were deemed wmmplicated. “ The accidents which are likely [says Miller] to occur during the progress of cure, are many and formidable; excess of inflammation and of inflam- matory fever; erysipelas; abscess after abscess, by inflammatory re- accession, probably connected with the lodgment of foreign matters; diffuse purulent infiltration; inflammatory action in veins, either in hard or soft textures, perhaps of the diffuse and suppurative kind; un- toward extension or recurrence of sloughing; haemorrhage on the separa- tion of sloughs, or by subsequent ulceration ; accession of sloughing pliagedsena, [or hospital gangrene]; non-union of fracture; necrosis, caries; exhaustion by hectic; tetanus; pyaemia [and septicaemia]; paralysis ; impairment of intellect; and loss of sexual and muscular and mental power, are some of these dangers. The conical bullets used in Minie rifles, and the elongated, conoido-cylindrical bullets of the Enfield, Chasse- pot, Needle gun, Martini-Henry, Snider, and other weapons, are far more destructive and murderous than the old spherical ones. In the Crimean, Franco-German, and other recent wars, they have been found to go through not only two, but as many as three men, perhaps lodging in the body of the third. They deviate from their course far less than the old ones. They generally perforate; in some cases drilling through bone— in others, completely smashing and comminuting it. They do not so often lodge as the old ones,+ for they generally strike the small end foremost. Sometimes they channel a long groove in a bone, but so did the globular ones. But both the old spherical and the modern elongated * The surgeon’s finger is often the best bullet-detector, when the wound admits of this being used. . _ ,, . „ , , . , _ , TT f Mr. L. S. Little (Report on the War in Schleswig-Holstein, Lond. Hosp. Reports and some later writers, say that conical bullets very often lodge, and that the statement in the text is inaccurate. Mr. Byron Blewitt tells us that this was due to the wretched guns with which the Danes and Prussians T'erc furnished. In the Franco-German war the majority of the conical and elongated bullets perforated, though when nearly spent, or at long ranges, they would lodge. To avoid risks from imperfect closure of the breech-block, orders were given to many regiments to fire from the hip.$