Gunshot injuries, their history, characteristic features, complications, and general treatment : with statistics concerning them as they have been met with in warfare / by Sir T. Longmore.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gunshot injuries, their history, characteristic features, complications, and general treatment : with statistics concerning them as they have been met with in warfare / by Sir T. Longmore. 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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    and undivided attention, for it to be conducted in an adequate manner. It cannot be treated as secondary or subordinate to other matters of duty, if it is to be executed with anything ap- proaching to that perfection of system under which the fighting services of the army are habitually conducted. Yet it was usually dealt with as altogether inferior in estimation to other military duties. It was intrusted to a department of the army, the Quartermaster-General’s, which had no training for it, and which was responsible for a large amount of other distinct duties of great military importance. It always proved impossible for this depart- ment to give the amount of attention to this service which, from its nature, it required in time of war. But the removal of the wounded, and a general attention to their first wants, is but a small part of the work which their proper care and treatment demand when armies are on active service. The duties, administrative and executive, when masses of wounded have to be provided for—when not unfrequently, too, the hospital service is charged with the care of a large number of sick also— are necessarily very onerous and of a very special character. They bear scarcely any resemblance to the duties devolving on medical practitioners who follow their avocations in settled communities, either in the modes of conducting them, or in the material ap- pliances employed in their execution. It cannot be said that these functions have ever been discharged by the Medical Departments of armies in the manner it might well be desired that they should have been in the interests of the wounded; but it can be truly said that, as a rule, they have been performed by them far better than it might have been anticipated the means at their command, whether of preparation or of execution, would have enabled them to do. I believe it to be unnecessary to describe the general plan of this treatise; it is sufficiently shown in the tabular arrangement of its contents. The history of the successive changes which have taken place in the characters of gunshot injuries since they were first presented in warfare will not be found in any special chapters on the subject. It has been sufficiently given, however, in the chapters on the alterations in fire-arms and projectiles to which the variations in their characters have been chiefly attributable. It is believed that this arrangement will have the advantage of