Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/570

 between the years 1575 and 1637, there is only one to which I shall refer in this brief account, viz., that which, in the edition of 1637, bears the title: "A profitable and necessarie Book of Observations, for all those that are burned with the flame of Gun-Powder." This book is full of brief histories of cases which came under the author's personal observation, and it therefore furnishes an excellent and truthful picture of the kind of wounds which the highwaymen and soldiers of that day inflicted, and of the treatment which was employed by the best English surgeons. The following may serve as sufficient examples:—

(1) A clothier, who had been assailed by robbers, received a dangerous wound in the left thigh. It was about four inches long and of such a depth that "the rotula or round bone of the knee did hang downe very much." Clowes first removed a clot of blood from the wound and then, "with a sharp and square-pointed needle, armed with a strong, even and smooth silke thred, well waxed, introduced five stitches, one good inch distant betweene every stitch, leaving a decent place for the wound to purge at." He then applied a suitable bandage. The patient's friends were not at all pleased that Clowes, having pronounced the wound dangerous, should not have been willing to state how much time would elapse before it would be healed. So they called in a charlatan, who on the following day removed the dressings and cut through all the stitches. Seven days later, Clowes was once more asked to see the case. He found the wound gaping widely and in a bad state. After adopting such measures as were most urgently required, he brought the edges of the wound together by the application of three strips of sticking-plaster. In due time healing took place, "but the motion perished: for the patient had the imperfection of a stiff knee, which constrained him to use a leather strap, fastened unto the toe of his shooe, and again made fast unto his body; and so he remaineth unto this day."

(2) The history of the second case may be given here in the following brief outlines. The patient, a ship's gunner, was wounded in the lower part of the abdomen by