Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/23

Rh school. His first work was on midwifery: he performed the Caesarian operation with success.

He mentions cases of recovery from injuries of the head, with loss of substance of the brain; the fracture of the internal table of the cranium, the outer remaining sound, and his successful division of the dura mater for the removal of effused blood and pus. He recommends repeated bleedings in concussion of the brain, and relates a fortunate application of the trephine as late as the seventeenth day from the injury. He speaks of abscess of the brain and of the fungus cerebri, its amputation under a misconception of its nature, and the recovery of the patient. He cured a formidable wound of the Duc de Guise, the lance having entered below the eye and re-appeared under the ear of the opposite side. His treatment of a wounded nerve in venesection, probably phlebitis, in the person of Charles IX., led that king to preserve his life in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He gives cases of recovery from wounds transfixing the body, but rejects the operation for inguinal hernia, because, as he conceives, emasculation is unavoidable.

The improved treatment of gun-shot wounds, by substituting cataplasms and mild applications for that of boiling oil, which had been hitherto invariably used, under an equally mistaken notion of the nature of such injuries and the effects of such a remedy, was