United States or Laos ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A marine who had sailed with me in a former ship was standing up as I passed, with his left arm hanging down. “What’s the matter, Conelly?” said I to him. “Not much,” replied he; “I am only winged above my elbow, and I am waiting my turn to be lopped.” His arm was dreadfully broken by a grape-shot. I regret to mention that out of sixteen amputations only two survived.
Several amputations of the thigh, for example, were taken away next day, and many of them must have spent the next twenty-four hours in the train, for the trains were very tardy in reaching their destination. It is not good treatment, but good surgery is not the primary object of war. The fighting troops are the first consideration, and the surgeon has to manage the best way he can.
Montgomery, in an excellent paper, advances the theory, which is very plausible, that intrauterine amputations are caused by contraction of bands or membranes of organized lymph encircling the limb and producing amputation by the same process of disjunctive atrophy that the surgeons induce by ligature.
Weinlechner speaks of a case in which a man devoid of all four extremities was exhibited before the Vienna Medical Society. The amputations were congenital, and on the right side there was a very small stump of the upper arm remaining, admitting the attachment of an artificial apparatus. He was twenty-seven years old, and able to write, to thread a needle, pour water out of a bottle, etc.
Just a moment's talk in the street twice interrupted by sentries, as they moved the hundred yards from the courtyard of Judenbach to the house of amputations. "...He was trying to lift a man from the hopelessness of death when I stepped up quietly behind," Berthe was saying. "He was wonderful about it, because he had felt the same hopelessness. I wish you could have heard him."
Many, not yet arrived at the limit of their sufferings, distributed themselves in the hospitals on this side of the Rhine, and even as far as the south of France, where they came to undergo various extirpations, incisions, and amputations, necessitated by the physical disorder so often inseparable from profound gangraene.
In August, however, came tidings that, after two amputations of his diseased limb, the Kaisar Friedrich III. had died it was said from over free use of melons in the fever consequent on the operation. His death was not likely to make much change in the government, which had of late been left to his son.
But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
There is a dislocation found at birth, or occurring shortly after, due to dropsy of the joint in utero; and another form due to succeeding paralysis of groups of muscles about the joint. The interesting instances of major amputations are so numerous and so well known as to need no comment here.
The shady little town was a sort of Golgotha now. Feverish eyes began to burn into one's heart, as he passed along the sidewalks. Red hospital flags, hung like regalia from half the houses. A table for amputations was set up in the open air, and nakedness glared hideously upon the sun.
Word Of The Day