Backwoods Surgery & Medicine

by Charles Stuart Moody

Experience has proved that the less one attempts to do with gunshot wounds the better. Nature has a tendency to wall off foreign bodies that are in the main sterile and will ordinarily do so with a bullet if given a chance. Keep the patient quiet, prevent infection from entering the wound, and trust to Nature to do the rest.

An incident will illustrate what takes place when Nature is given an opportunity to throw out her plastic wall material around a foreign body. Some years ago a party of Eastern people were camping in the heart of the Bitter Roots. Among the party were two boys of the age when boys are prone to try experiments. They bored a small hole in a spruce tree and drove into it a high power 30–30 cartridge. Then they stood off some fifteen feet and fired at the cartridge with a small rifle. One of them hit it.

The 30–30 shell came back and penetrated the abdomen of the juvenile marksman, burying itself and driving pieces of clothing into the abdominal cavity. The messenger who came for me was thirty-six hours on the trail and I was an equal length of time reaching the camp. The people had had sense enough to keep the patient quiet and I found him resting fairly easy. So deeply had the missile penetrated that it required a considerable incision to remove it.

When I reached the bottom of the wound I found that Nature had thrown about the wounded area a wall of protective lymph and all the pus that had accumulated was in a pocket. I laid the pocket well open, evacuated its contents, and removed the bits of cloth that I found, dressed the wound, and had the satisfaction of seeing the youngster recover.

Burns are classified according to degree of injury. Those of the first degree are where the skin is reddened, but no blister formed. The second degree includes those where there has been decided blistering, and the third, where the flesh has been charred. Those of the first and second degrees are the most common in about the proportion of 99 to 1.

A burn of the first degree can be best relieved by the application of cold water. This is contrary to the teachings of a few years ago, but is in full accord with that of to-day. The water should be changed as fast as it becomes warm.

Burns of the second degree require more care. In the first place, do not interfere with the blister. The primary object in treating burns is to exclude air and the skin remaining intact will do this much better than any artificial means.

The Indians of the Northwest prepare a dressing for burns by cooking deer suet with balm of gilead buds. This is the most effective application for severe burns I have ever seen. If deer suet is not available, any fresh tallow that has been cooked will serve as well. Throw a handful of the buds into a vessel and cover them with the suet, boil for thirty minutes, and strain. When nearly cold apply to the burn and cover with a soft cloth. The pain ceases almost immediately.

It seems singular after all that has been written on the subject, but few people know how to restore a drowned person. The matter is really quite simple, yet it requires great attention to detail. Spasmodic efforts are useless. The thing has to be gone about methodically and the method persisted in for a long time, often in the face of seeming certain defeat.

In the first place, statistics show that no person who has been submerged in the water for a period of seven minutes was ever resuscitated. It is extremely doubtful if after five minutes' immersion anything can be accomplished, still it is worth the effort.