More OT MAdness: Field Surgery with a khukuri?

Well Danny slighty off topic but related.

In ww2 in the Chindits , if you were 100s of miles from a camp,in enemy held terrotory The injured couldnt be left behind for the Japanese to play with & if the living had to move, only the walking wounded left with them.

Thats one of the reasons a lot of the Burma deep penetration lads in the chindits didnt smile much. ever again in some cases. The real 1000 yard stare.

My father talked about this on his death bed, He had kept it to himself for 60 odd years. In his words "we left it in the jungle, as the people back home wouldnt understand."

Killing your wounded friends & comrades isnt easy on your soul.

He spent 5 years in Burma & Thailand,& then Malaya at the end.

No helicopter evacuations back then.

No wounded & no prisoners. well not till 1945 anyway.

Probably different if you were in a large operation with mules & stuff. or near a base camp.

Spiral
 
I often wonder if there are any of my generation and younger that are as self-sacrificing and as tough as the men who fought WWII. These guys signed up for "the duration", not just a 1 or 2 year tour of duty. My hat is off to them, and all of our warriors, past and present.

Steve
 
I didnt mean to make anybody feel bad.
I was curious about stories more like Stephenson and some of the Ivory hunters had in Africa 100 years ago...

I think it was Stephenson that took a bullet in the calf and after two days his leg was swollen and greenish.
He sharpened and cleaned his knife as best as he could and cut his own calf open.
(Behind his back)
HE passed out and woke up to realize he had to do it again.
This time he bit on a stick and lanced his calf until greenish, foul smelling pus shot out of the leg.
One of his guides then stepped on the leg to get it all out, at which point he passed out again.

He survived and lived many more years exploring Africa and having adventures in the Dark Continent.
Tough bastards, those English hunters...
 
Its cool ,Danny, I thought it an interesting thread, but what I had to say seemed relevant as well & I thought you might be interested.

I feel emotion when I think of it, But thats ok. I dont mind. I brought it up not you.Helps me see why he was the man he was.

I enjoy the storeis of the tough & the brave as well. As Steve says hats off to warriers past & present.

cheers,
Spiral
 
How bout Yakuza, anybody here had to hack off your pinky with a Gelbu Special to please your boss?
 
Bit of old history.


A Description of American Civil War Field Surgery

This page contains a description of the most common Civil War surgery, the amputation. A few words about why there were so many amputations may be appropriate here. Many people have construed the Civil War surgeon to be a heartless indivdual or someone who was somehow incompetent and that was the reason for the great number of amputations performed. This is false. The medical director of the Army of the Potomac, Dr. Jonathan Letterman, wrote in his report after the battle of Antietam:

The surgery of these battle-fields has been pronounced butchery. Gross misrepresentations of the conduct of medical officers have been made and scattered broadcast over the country, causing deep and heart-rending anxiety to those who had friends or relatives in the army, who might at any moment require the services of a surgeon. It is not to be supposed that there were no incompetent surgeons in the army. It is certainly true that there were; but these sweeping denunciations against a class of men who will favorably compare with the military surgeons of any country, because of the incompetency and short-comings of a few, are wrong, and do injustice to a body of men who have labored faithfully and well. It is easy to magnify an existing evil until it is beyond the bounds of truth. It is equally easy to pass by the good that has been done on the other side. Some medical officers lost their lives in their devotion to duty in the battle of Antietam, and others sickened from excessive labor which they conscientiously and skillfully performed. If any objection could be urged against the surgery of those fields, it would be the efforts on the part of surgeons to practice "conservative surgery" to too great an extent.

Still the Civil War surgeon suffers from being called a butcher or some other derisive term.

The slow-moving Minie bullet used during the American Civil War caused catastophic injuries. The two minie bullets, for example, that struck John Bell Hood's leg at Chickamauga destroyed 5 inches of his upper thigh bone. This left surgeons no choice but to amputate shattered limbs. Hood's leg was removed only 4 and 1/2 inches away from his body. Hip amputations, like Hood's, had mortality rates of around 83%. The closer to the body the amputation was done, the more the increase in the wound being mortal. An upper arm amputation, as was done on Stonewall Jackson or General Oliver O. Howard (who lost his arm at Fair Oaks in 1862) had a mortality rate of about 24%.

This site is, basically, devoted to medicine of the battlefield. Other topics are of course covered, but here you will see a description of a common battlefield amputation. Missing arms and legs were permanent, very visible reminders of the War. Amputees ranged from the highest ranking officers, like John B. Hood, Stonewall Jackson, and Oliver O. Howard, all the way down to the enlisted men, such as Corproal C.N. Lapham of the 1st Vermont Cavalry who lost both of his legs to a cannon ball. Hood, Jackson, Howard, and Lapham were certainly not alone in their loss, as 3 out of 4 wounds were to the extremities...in the Federal Army this led to 30,000 amputations.

Civil War Amputation Case


The wait for treatment could be a day, maybe two and that was not out of the ordinary. And when treatment was finally done on the poor soldier, it was not done antiseptically. It would only be in 1865 that Joseph Lister embarked upon the era of antiseptic surgery. Careful hand washing by the surgeon of the Civil War was not even done. The doctors wore blood splattered clothes. When something was dropped, it was simply rinsed in cool, often bloody water. They used sponges that had been used in previous cases and simply dipped in cold water before using them again on the next person.

A surgeon recalled: "We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats, we used undisinfected instruments from undisinfected plush lined cases. If a sponge (if they had sponges) or instrument fell on the floor it was washed and squeezed in a basin of water and used as if it was clean"

The injuries to be dealt with were dreadful and the fault of the soft lead Minie Ball. With the capability to kill at over 1,000 yards, this soft lead bullet caused large, gaping holes, splintered bones, and destroyed muscles, arteries and tissues beyond any possible repair. Those shot with them through the body, or the head, would not be expected to live. Almost all wounds were caused by the bullet, with canister, cannonballs, shells, and edged weapons next down on the list.


Confederate soldiers killed near the Wheatfield at Gettysburg
(Library of Congress) The weapons (particularly the rifle) of the 1860s were far ahead of the tactics; i.e. the generals still thought to take a position you needed to go at it with the bayonet. The cynlidrical lead bullet, the Minie ball, was rather large and heavy (.58 caliber usually). When it hit bone, it tended to expand. When it hit "guts" (i.e. the intestines) it tended to tear them in ways the old smoothbore musket ball didn't do. The wounds from a minie bullet were ugly. Since they crushed and smashed bone so badly, the docs didn't have much choice but to amputate a limb. Wounds to the stomach were almost always a death sentence.


Civil War doctors were woefully ill-prepared; of 11,000 Northern physicans, 500 had performed surgery. In the Confederacy, of 3,000, only 27. Many docs got their first introduction to surgery on the battlefield. Doctors usually didn't specialize. Medical school, for many, was just 2 years (some less, few more). Surgeons reacted by adapting. They learned surgery on the job. And people died, of course, until they learned and became better... Many docs were political appointments too; there were no licensing boards in the 1860s... Army exam boards often even let in quacks.
This barn at Sharpsburg served as a hospital for the wounded. Barns were often taken over by surgeons for use.
(Library of Congress) Of the wounds recorded in the Civil War, 70%+ were to the extremities. And so, the amputation was the common operation of the Civil War surgeon.

The field hospital was hell on earth. The surgeon would stand over the operating table for hours without a let up. Men screamed in delirium, calling for loved ones, while others laid pale and quiet with the effect of shock. Only the division's best surgeons did the operating and they were called "operators". Already, they were performing a crude system of triage. The ones wounded through the head, belly, or chest were left to one side because they would most likely die. This may sound somewhat cruel or heartless, but it allowed the doctors to not waste precious time and to save those that could be saved with prompt attention. This meant that common battlefield surgery was the amputation.


The surgeon would wash out the wound with a cloth (in the Southern Army sponges were long exhausted) and probe the wound with his finger (the finger being usually used), or a probe perhaps, looking for bits of cloth, bone, or the bullet. If the bone was broken or a major blood vessel torn, he would often decide on amputation. Later in the War, surgeons would sometimes experiment with resection, but far more common was amputation.

Deciding upon an amputation, the surgeon would adminster chloroform to the patient. What is portrayed in "Hollywood" and in much "modern" conception of what surgery in the War was like during the war is false; anesthesia was in common and widespread use during the war.... it would make more complicated and longer operations possible as the era of antiseptic surgery was embarked upon (but too late for the poor Civil War soldier). With the patient insensible, the surgeon would take his scapel and make an incision through the muscle and skin down to the bone. He would make incisions both above and below, leaving a flap of skin on one side. Taking his bonesaw (hence Civil War slang for a doctor is a "Sawbones") he would saw through the bone until it was severed. He would then toss it into the growing pile of limbs. The operator would then tie off the arteries with either horsehair, silk, or cotton threads. The surgeon would scrape the end and edges of the bone smooth, so that they would not work back through the skin. The flap of skin left by the surgeon would be pulled across and sewed close, leaving a drainage hole. The stump would be covered perhaps with isinglass plaster, and bandaged, and the soldier set aside where he would wake up thirsty and in pain, the "Sawbones" already well onto his next case.


A good surgeon could amputate a limb in under 10 minutes. If the soldier was lucky, he would recover without one of the horrible so-called "Surgical Fevers", i.e. deadly pyemia or gangrene.

15 years after the War, surgeon George Otis cited the five principal advances of Civil War surgery: the surgeons had learned "something" about head injuries, how to deal with awful "ghastly wounds" without dismay, they had learned how to litigate arteries, information on injuries to spine and vertebrate had been "augumented," and "theory and practice" in chest wounds had been forwarded.

A little about the "Surgical Fevers". These were infections arising from the septic state of Civil War surgery. As you should have been able to see, the Civil War surgeon was interested not so much in cleanlieness, but speed. As such, and not knowing anything about antiseptic surgery, fevers arose. Of these, the most deadly was probably pyemia. Pyemia means, literally, pus in the blood. It is a form of blood poisioning. Nothing seemed to halt pyemia, and it had a mortality rate of over 90%. Other surgical diseases included tetanus (with a mortality rate of 87%), erysepilas, which struck John B. Gordon's arm after he was wounded at Antietam, and osteomyelitis which is an inflammation of the bone. Also, there was something called "Hospital Gangrene". A black spot, about the size of a dime or so, would appear on the wound. Before long, it would spread through, leaving the wound an evil smelling awful mess. The Hospital Gangrene of the Civil War is an extinct disease now.

Primary amputation mortality rate: 28%
Secondary amputation rate: 52%

Most of the information from this page came from Coco's "A Strange and Blighted Land," and Adams's "Doctors in Blue"


Spiral

ps.
looking up self surgery on the web is an eye opener!
 
DannyinJapan said:
How bout Yakuza, anybody here had to hack off your pinky with a Gelbu Special to please your boss?
Click to expand...
Err no, but I performed surgery on an ingrown toe nail with a SAK, does that count?
 
I learned just a couple of days ago from John Powell that the little tool in old khukuri kits that I thought was a button hook was really a surgical tool. Somebody has to try to fix the halt and lame when there is no doctor around.
 
I got a very large and rather nasty splinter jammed under my ring finger nail all the way to the nail bed. I used a well-sharpened HI Karda to cut a slit through the nail near the cuticle and push the splinter up enough to get a grip on it from the top. It's hardly major surgery, but it is Khuk-related.

The slit, which is about 1/4" long has almost grown out of the nail now.
 
I'm passing on the casteration story.... I did live on a farm growing up, I know about those rubber bands...
 
Yeah, IIRC the trade name was "elasticator" but we just called them cheerios because of their uncanny resemblance to green, emasculating breakfast cereal. I ended the masculine aspirations of a lot of rams and billies with those in my youth.
 
Tis a strange world, people who remove thier own eyes, balls, labia ,foreskins & other assorted god given or nature born pieces, due to distorted principles , needs & beliefs.

I find it Sad, the amount of damage prevalent in society.

Wish I had a magic wand.

Spiral
 
I forwarded the link DIJ provided to a friend, and he said:

That it was gross. Good enough for me! I don't need to see it.
 
yes it was gross, i did give warning.
I do wonder sometimes, how much of my thinking and desire is simply an expression of male hormones.
I would like to think that I am more than just a biological entity.
i could understand removing the testicles for that reason.
do you understand ?
removing unnecessary input from your own thought processes?

no matter how many years of college you get, your balls never get any smarter.
Look at Bill Clinton.
 
Didn't "Heaven's Gate", the cult that suicided out west a few years ago, practice castration for that purpose?
 
I didnt know that. It sounds interesting, ill have to read about them.
IS there a good expose book on that group?
 
Yeps, I'll skip after seeing a couple types of farm animals done that way. Still have to watch for infection.

Keith
 
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