The Surgeons Mate Or Military Domestique Surgery With A Treatise Of A Cure Of A Plague Etc Viaticum Being The Pathway To The Surgeon S Chest With Diagrams

Wars in the 19th Century were accompanied by a very heavy loss of life from infectious diseases. Typhus fever, dysentery, malaria, typhoid fever and yellow fever caused many more deaths than wounds inflicted by enemy actions. During the Peninsular War, for example, for every soldier dying of a wound, four succumbed to disease. This book examines the development and evolution of surgical practice against this overwhelming risk of death due to disease. It reviews three major conflicts during this time: the Peninsular War, the Crimean War and the Boer War and also considers many minor wars fought by the British Empire in the intervening years, and highlights significant medical and surgical developments during these conflicts. War surgery in the first part of the 19th Century was brutal, and it had to be carried out swiftly. It was performed at speed because there were no anaesthetics and the wounded often died during the procedure. Surgeons focussed their attention on wounds of the arms and legs, because limbs were both easily accessible to the surgeon (unlike organs inside the abdomen and chest) and lent themselves well to amputation. This was commonly the operation of choice for many war wounds of arms and legs. Some surgeons performed more difficult surgical procedures to try to preserve the limbs and attempted to repair damaged tissues, but these operations took longer and caused greater suffering to the patient. Abdominal and chest wounds were not treated since surgeons did not have the means, the ability, or the understanding, to cut into the abdomen and chest to repair the damaged organs successfully. An important development which contributed to surgery moving forwards was the discovery of general anaesthesia, which became available in time for the Crimean War. However, whilst it certainly rendered operations pain-free, it was associated with significant numbers of deaths during surgery on wounded soldiers because of the poorly understood effects that anaesthetics had, particularly on the heart. As a result, operative surgery did not extend its scope a great deal, and military surgery remained focussed on surgery of the limbs. However, fewer amputations were performed during the Boer War at the end of this period. Britain sent observers to several wars in which it was not involved to learn military lessons and to understand the medical and surgical aspects of war. The American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War were two such conflicts. The Russo-Japanese War resulted in a very significant advance in surgery for abdominal wounds, but Western observers either failed to notice or ignored pioneering work performed by a Russian female surgeon called Vera Gedroits. As a result, when the Great War began in 1914, lessons had to be re-learned by British surgeons, and many soldiers who suffered penetrating abdominal wounds lost their lives when they should have survived. Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of war surgery is that successive generations of surgeons make the same mistakes as their forebears and the same lessons have to be learned time and again.

Excerpt from Hand-Book of Surgical Operations Tms hand-book of Surgical Operations has been prepared at the suggestion of several professional friends, who early entered the medical staff of the Volunteer Army. It was alleged that the military surgeon of this country had no small and convenient work suitable for a pocket companion, containing the details of the more common as well as the important operations in sur gery. He must either encumber himself with the large treatises on general and operative surgery, or rely upon his unaided memory in the emergencies of the service. In its scope the work is limited to those branches of Operative surgery which are of the most importance to the military sur geon. This was deemed advisable, in order to render the volume as convenient and portable as possible. Within these limits the constant effort has been to embrace the greatest number of sub jeeta, to arrange them in the best form for reference, and to give the largest amount of practical details, anatomical and Opera tive. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.