JOURNAL OF AMA 1885

Download or read book JOURNAL OF AMA 1885 written by N. S. Davis and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2016-12-24 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Journal of American Medical Association, 1885, Vol. 4: Containing the Official Record of Its Proceedings and the Reports and Papers Presented in the Several Sections Introduction and extraction or needles. M. Despris, in a lecture which he delivered at La Charite (gazette Medica/e, Med. Times) made some interesting observations. A young woman, striking a table with the palm of her hand, thrust a needle into the base of her middle finger and this, striking against the first phalanx, broke and became fixed there. When seen two days afterwards, the fragment of needle had completely disappeared amidst the in amed tissues. On pressing at the base of the mid dle finger, however, a foreign body, pressure on which occasioned pain, could be felt An incision was made at this point, and a fragment of needle, measuring 1% centimetres, removed by the forceps. Here the incision was justified by the fact that the foreign body was firmly fixed. The subject of a second case was a young woman, into whose breast a needle was driven obliquely by a blow, and entirely disappeared under the skin. Guided by the patient the presence of the needle could be ascertained but in this case an incision for its removal would be im proper, for the integuments of the breast are so mo bile that an incision made in the skin would not correspond to the foreign body. The presence of the needle having been exactly determined, we should seize it in its length and make pressure on its two ends. At one of these we may perceive a slight cracking sound, and here the patient also feels a sharper pain than elsewhere, and this is the point of the needle. If we now press firmly upon the other end this point'will be forced through the integument and can then be seized with a forceps. An incision should never be made except when the body is fixed in the tissues, as in the first case. One caution must be borne in mind, and that is, we should never attempt an extraction on the mere statement of the patient that a needle is present in the tissues, and when we are unable, to verify its presence; for sometimes persons declare that they have needles in their tissues when they have not; or when we are consulted the needle may have already migrated to another part of the body, this migration sometimes taking place very rapidly. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."