Page:Recovery from the passage of an iron bar through the head.djvu/6

6 afterwards (with what I could aid him by taking hold of his left arm) walked up a long flight of stairs, and got upon the bed in the room where he was dressed. He seemed perfectly conscious, but was becoming exhausted from the hæmorrhage, which, by this time, was quite profuse, the blood pouring from the lacerated sinus in the top of his head, and also finding its way into the stomach, which ejected it as often as every fifteen or twenty minutes. He bore his sufferings with firmness, and directed my attention to the hole in his cheek, saying, "the iron entered there and passed through my head." Pulse at this time 60, soft and regular. He recognized me at once, and said "he hoped he was not much hurt." His person, and the bed on which he lay, was one gore of blood. Assisted by my friend Dr. Williams who was first called to the patient in my absence, we proceeded to examine and dress his wound. From the appearance of the wound in the top of his head, the fragments of bone being lifted up, the brain protruding from the opening and hanging in shreds upon the hair, it was evident that the opening in the skull was occasioned by some force acting from below, upward, having very much the shape of an inverted funnel, the edges of the scalp everted and the frontal bone extensively fractured, leaving an irregular oblong opening in the skull of two by three and one-half inches. The globe of the left eye was protruded from its orbit by one-half its diameter, and the left side of the face was more prominent than the right side. The pulsations of the brain were distinctly seen and felt.

The scalp was shaven, the coagula removed, with three small triangular pieces of the frontal bone, and in searching to ascertain if there were foreign bodies in the brain, I passed the index finger of the right hand into the opening its entire length, in the direction of the wound in the cheek, which received the left index finger in like manner, the introduction of the finger