The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-12-05

| C4AANNNp
 who died from wounds, exclusive of
 those killed on the field, and 16291 ofti- lcers and men who died from disease. It
 is true of course, that much larger
 proportion of men were in actual touch
 with the enemy in the Crimea than in
 South Africa, where many have been
 chiefly occupied in guarding the com
 munications Out of 7,464 British in-
 fantry on Mount Inkerman 597 were killed and 1760 wounded, but we nave no information as to the subsequent
 number of deaths among the latter. But
 it is certain that the slender and swift
 ly travelling bullets of the Lee-Metford
 and Mauser rifles have penetrated the
 human body in all directions without
 indicting any permanent injury, and that this experience has not been par
 ralleled in any previous warfare.
 It has also been found that these bull lets may remain mbedded in various bodily tissues quite harmlessly; and, las a rule unless they were very acces-
 sible, with less danger to the patient than would have attended upon at-
 tempts to extract them. In the Franco German war the heavy bullets then in
 
 wounded exclusive of killed. of fifty
 or sixty per cent, and when passing
 through the chest or abdomen were us-
 ually productive of fatal hemorrhages.
 In South Africa men who were shot
 through either of these regions con- stant1y recovered almost without
 symptom. Sir William MacCormac re-
 lates that a Boer shot through the
 lung, smoked his pipe comfortably the
 next day, and on the following one in
 sisted on going home to his wife; and
 he gives many instances or recovery af- ter bullets had passed through one, and | in some instances, through both lungs,
 He prints diagrams of entrance and
 exit openings which justify the belief
 that the heart itself must have been
 wounded in several instances. in which, nevertheless, good recoveries were made. MT. Clinton Dent places on rec ord that no class among the wounded
 afforded more satisfactory results than
 the cases of head injuries. Many re- coveries are to be met with in hospitals
 abroad, or now at home, in which bull l lets have perforated the skull and pas sed through long tracts of brain sub stance. In nearly all of these trephlnlng has been practiced and the experience
 of the war goes to show that in head injuries it should seldom or never be omitted. The skull is made up of two
 layers or tables of bone, the interior one harder and more brittle than the exterior, and the consequence is that a mere channel may be plowed in the later. when the former is extensively fractured and is lacerating the brain by splinters which ought to be removed.
 Tn abdominal wounds, on the con- trary. in which much was expected from surgery, the results have been far less satisfactory, and the recoveries without operation were so numerous and complete that almost all of the lat ter cases were left to the unaided pow CTS of nature. MT. Treves describes a succession of examples of men shot | through the abdomen, who were left | untouched and who suffered no more | than such trihing symptoms as they | might get from eating a green apple" The cases which did best were those | of men who were shot when fasting, | who were for many hours on the field ' without being moved, and who had no | water; .n other words, men who were left undisturbed long enough to permit | spontaneous agglutination of the adges of any internal wounds; thus repeating | very old experience of military sur gerry, that the wounded belonging to the vanauished in an engagement will | often make better reooverleS than those belonging to the victors, who are us- ually attended to first. Tn all of the cases referred to by Mr, Treves, 1t was probable that the lntestines, and in some of them it was certain that the but the Mauser bullet, fortunately us- ually cut its way through clothing with out carrying any fragment before it. The lodgment of a piece of septic cloth in a bullet wound is frequently fatal; and, hence, in the days of dueling it was customary to use only a small charge of powder when meeting a man whom it was desired to kill, in order that the bullet and some cloth might both remain, The war confirms an other dueling experience; for, when wore swords and used them, were more familiar than they have been of late years with the com parative harmlessness of cleanly per forating wounds of the vscera or of the great cavities of the body.
 Practically the most distressing cases from South Africa are those of injury to important nerves. Nerves are bundles of flores running approximately parallel to the length of the limbs and serving two principal 'unctions-that of conveying sensation rom the external parts to the con- sciousness, and that os so conveying l he mandates of the will to the muscles IS to bring about the performance of movements. In many cases in which a pig bullet would have smashed q limb md rendered amputation above the in- ury necessary, the small bullet passes through, leaving the bulk Of the limb lnhurt, but perhaps wounding or sev- ring an important nerve Even when uch nerve is not wounded it may LGterWard come to be compressed or - ,ound down, by scar tissue formed dur ng the process of repair; and, however [ t is imnlicated 1nee of movement nr c