| Show MAGIC OF SURGICAL SCIENCE IS MAKING NEW MEN OF OLD some remarkable instances where operations have practically rebuilt vital and important portions of the human body that had been shot away in the battles gas gangrene Is surgeons worst enemy london abo marvelous progress that has been made in recent times in surgical science Is impressively revealed by a journey to some of the larger military Lo made possible through tile the courtey courtesy of sir alfred keogh director general of the army medical service in all the hospitals ahat a hat the medical stair staff set above till all Is conservative sur gry gory that Is to say the saving of limbs in order that the patients may re remain allain useful members of the community thus at the herbert hospital at shooters there have been since the beginning of the war from three to tour four thousand operations and colonel simpson the officer in charge declared that lie he did not believe there had been in till all more than 25 primary amputations imputations the impression bolt by a tour of these hospitals upon the haymans lay mans mind braind is that outsiders have an utterly inadequate idea of the debt they owe to modern surgery at a time like the present day dav by day the surgeons are giving to the nation new men for old they have embarked upon a great real mission of hope among the nations soldiers they tire are doing more than would have been credible twenty dears ago to rob war nr of its ultimate horror out of the hundreds of Ivond wonderful erful co crises es brought to ones notice during these visits it Is only possible to describe a few that may he be regarded as typical of this trade of mending soldiers take first the new nerve surgery here Is a man with a bullet hole near his collar bone wild which eh severed the nerve controlling the muscles of the wrist the result was its wrist drop and a hand which until quite recently would have been regarded its as incurably useless the two ends of the lie severed 3 nerve have been freed from what had already become no more than ft a sear scar they have been reunited and there Is ij every prospect that in less than a year the hand will be almost as good as ever As simple as tying up the two ends of a cut telephone wire says the surgeon who operated amazing nerve cases there are more remarkable nerve cases still A man had part of the fleshy portion of his arm shot aw away ray carrying with it four inches of the nerve necessary to control the hand movements the surgeon rang up several eral hospitals on the telephone till he be heard of what he wanted the amputation that afternoon of a healthy limb the limb happened to be a leg and it w was is amputated in the afternoon no hooner t onar was it cu cut oft off than four or five inches t f practically living nerve were removed from the calf placed in a saline bath and rushed by taxi to the other hospital here the patient was already under an anesthetic the wound mound in ills his arm was opened with th a lancet the ends of the indispensable nerve quickly found and the circuit established reestablished re cati ba I 1 shed as it were by means of the first patients four inches of filament today the man is in a fair way of regaining the full use of his hand bone surgery on rather similar lines Is more familiar but hardly less surprising sang when you meet and talk to a man who converses with the aid of a lower jaw part of which was only a few weeks ago part of his right leg it was mended with two and one half indies inches of one of his shin bones the shin has quite healed and the hole will be completely filled with new bone before long iong so accommodating Is nature when treated with mith knowledge another patient Is perfectly happy and prosperous with three inches of the fibula of ills his left leg neatly mor used in the of ills hla right firm arm lie he too will finally suffer no loss of lione bone whatever the variants of such operations are endless and only limited by the ingenuity and enterprise of each surgeon carpentry and legs of remarkable examples of carpentry applied to broken limbs most hospitals have two or three if 11 not more on land hand A young fellow was brought into the hospital with one leg shortened by five inches owing to tile the ends of the broken bone overlapping lie he seemed a hopeless cripple the le leg was re broken under boder an anesthetic 11 an eighth of in an inch cut oil off from each side of the fracture so as to secure a smooth joint and a steel plate fastened on math ith six screws precisely as one would mend the broken leg of a table tile the plate and screws will remain in position lon as a permanent addition to the soldiers anatomy tor for steel will not rust among the tissues and the anan tin has a leg practically as long and as straight as and rather stronger than it was intended to be by nature some of the most cruel wounds are those in the jaw lint but even here what the skill SIMI and patience of the surgeon have been able to do is wonderful one poor fellow who had been pi provided provided with a new root roof to ills his mouth was one of the most cheerful of the me patients ills comic songs are the delight of the ward you cease to be amazed fit at any height of human skill or human courage after a few hours in any of these military hospitals you know for certain then that man Is unconquerable where the injury la Is to the upper part of the face resulting in say the removal of the nose and one eye magical results are aire being achieved in a southwestern district hospital by the provision of masks perfectly counterfeiting the lost section of the physiognomy derwent wood is the inventor of the plan with the help of photographs of what a patient was like before being beang wounded lie he will make a false nose of silvered copper artistically painted to match the surrounding complexion which will so far defy detection as to enable the owner to go but into anio the world again without shrinking and play his old part in the affairs of men A remarkable operation here Is another remarkable case not long ago a wounded guardsman was brought into the queen alexandra hospital at millbank suffering from a shrapnel wound examination under the X rays showed that a piece alece of metal as large as a halfpenny and much thicker had entered the breast and lodged in the region of the heart it was in fact actually touching the heart and impeding its action an operation was decided on and the surgeon thrust his hand right into the opening and pulled out the piece of metal which Is preserved as a souvenir there wits was a danger that during anesthesia the lungs would collapse and therefore ether was pumped into them to keep them distended that gallant guardsman is now out and about and it Is declared that ile he will mill not feel the slightest ill III effects from his strange experience 4 in this hospital there is at present a serbian officer who was wounded in his own country and brought to england for treatment it was a case of severe injury to the jaw sir francis farmer removed a piece of bone about two and a half inches long front from the tibia of the patient and having carefully prepared a bed in which to place it fixed it in the jaw the leg Is now healed and the patient can eat cat wonderfully well but this re fitting and as it were rebuilding of citizens Is not enough they must first be snatched from that progressive process of destruction associated soc socia ted with the dreaded word sepsis that creeping death of the tissues which Is the surgeons niort most remorseless le SS enemy and here again one encounters the marvellous marcellous marv ellous in this war the variety of sepsis that has haa claimed more victims than man an other Is that known in doctors SI slang gas gangrene to 1 ns as gas gangrene caused by the presence in a wound of certain types ot of bacilli classed its as anaerobic that is bacilli which cannot live in air tira vital principle of which Is oxygen they eaf exist st like the tetanus bacilli ln in cultivated soil and it is because cause the war Is being fought in france among the peasants fl fields ad s that they are introduced so constantly by ricocheting bullets or scraps of earth stained clothing into the soldiers wounds once there they set about producing tiny gas bubbles among the tissues hence the name dame gast gas gangrene but the gas they cannot endure Is oxygen find and the obvious way to destroy them is to introduce oxygen into the innermost recesses of the wound this is secured by various methods according to the nature of the injury A hole right through the shoulder will be sterilized by the use of a wick drawing peroxide of hydrogen froni a small tank above the bed another adoth or kind ol of wound may be sprayed with ozone and the third more conveniently dealt with by means of a perforated tube fed with oxygen gas from a cylinder the operations to which reference has boon been made mad e would doubtless be described as severe even by the surgeons surgeon 4 themselves nevertheless modern science has robbed them of most of thili terrors the improvements in anen have been such that it Is no uncommon thing for an operation to last two hours and for the patient to feel no III effects from the drug a quarter of an hour after he recovers consciousness some indeed will be smoking a cigarette within that space of time the secret lies iles in the adraan administration of oxygen with tile the anesthetic |
