SECT. LXXXVI.—ON A BRUISED NAIL.
Since, owing to nails having been bruised by accidents, pains supervene, which compel us to operate upon them, it will be sufficient to give you Galen’s account of the matter. He says, then: “When the nails are contused we have found the evacuation of the blood a palpable remedy for soothing the pain, when it and the throbbings are very violent. But we must make an oblique incision, not straight from above downwards, with a sharp scalpel, so that when the blood is evacuated the divided part of the nail may serve as a cover to the parts under it. But if you make a straight incision from above down to the fleshy excrescence, as it is called, another body is formed from the flesh below the nail shooting out through the division of the nail, whence pains again invade, as in the complaint we call paronychia, owing to the flesh under the nail being compressed by it. Wherefore, one may see the patients immediately relieved from pain by this section. On the following days we may gently raise the divided part of the nail, and press the sanies from under the nail, and then again, as I said, apply the nail as a cover to the flesh below. The rest of the treatment of the finger should be soothing and discutient.”
Commentary. Avicenna and Rhases approve of the plan of treatment here recommended, upon the authority of Galen. Rhases, in fact, gives the very words of Galen. (Cont. xxxvi.)
Albucasis directs us, in the case of a bruised nail, first to have recourse to venesection, and then to make a transverse (oblique?) incision through it. (Chirurg. ii, 91.)
See our remarks in [the sixtieth section] of this Book on the confusion of the terms transverse and oblique by the translators of the Arabians.
The same treatment is recommended by Haly Abbas. (Pract. ix, 67.)