Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/510

 under the title: "Feldbuch der Wundartzney." This book, which is illustrated with exceptionally good woodcuts, two specimens of which are here reproduced (Figs. 19 and 20), contains the earliest discussion of gunshot wounds; and, in his remarks on the proper manner of treating such wounds, von Gerssdorff leads one to infer that he shared, although somewhat hesitatingly, the at that time prevailing belief that these wounds are poisoned. He was a pronounced advocate of the use of the red-hot cautery in cases of serious hemorrhage from a wound. When it was found that the ball had penetrated the flesh to some depth, he recommended that it be cut out; and if, after the removal of the missile, the patient complained of much pain in the wound, hot oil was to be poured into it freely. Before the employment of firearms in warfare, amputation of a limb was rarely performed—that is, only in cases where gangrene had developed in the corresponding hand or foot. But von Gerssdorff assures us that, up to the time of writing his "Feldbuch," he had personally performed "nearly two hundred amputations." This great increase in the frequency of performing this operation is clearly to be attributed to the increased use of the new agent—gunpowder—in warfare. In this operation, according to his own declaration, von Gerssdorff was not in the habit of suturing the flaps. Instead, he brought the opposing edges together and then covered the stump thus formed with the bladder of some animal. There are a number of other interesting details relating to von Gerssdorff's manner of conducting this important operation, but it is not practicable to give up the space that would be required for a satisfactory description of them. There is one point, however, to which I may be permitted to refer very briefly in this place, viz., the manner in which the surgeons of this and even much earlier periods secured a fairly satisfactory degree of local anaesthesia when they had occasion to perform an amputation. They produced insensibility of the part by tying a band tightly around the limb a short distance above the spot at which the amputation was to be performed. At a somewhat later period, as in the middle