Wound care in regency England

[lothlaurien]

Hello! I was just wondering if anyone would happen to know anything about wound care towards the end of the regency period, round about 1820. I have two characters, both medical students at Oxford University (so they have some medical training/knowledge), one of whom has received a deep cut on the chest from a sharp ring in a fight - the kind that

Comments

[xolo]

In 1820 there'd have been no effort made to sterilize anything. It wasn't until the 1840s or so that some doctors (notably notably Ignatz Semmelweiss began to theorize that the awful death rate in hospitals might be caused by doctors unwittingly carrying bits of dead tissue on their hands and instruments from the autopsy room to living patients. Although his mechanism was incorrect, his remedy (washing hands between patients) gave a greatly-reduced death rate. In the late 1850s, Louis Pasteur was able to prove that acid fermentation in wine (an unwanted outcome, by which some batches of wine turned sour) was the result of airborne microbes. Joseph Lister began to pursue the idea that airborne microbes, along with those carried on the skin and surgical implements, might be the actual cause of post-operative infections. In the late 1860s he introduced sterile field surgery, with a carbolic acid mister working to keep the field germ-free. The practice met with some resistance, but by the 1880s surgery had gone from a last-ditch

[lothlaurien]

Thank you, I suspected it was a little early for sterilization!

[donutsweeper]

Gunn's domestic medicine might be helpful. The 4th edition, published 1835, is readable online: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-9506665-bk

[lothlaurien]

Ooh, that sounds like a fantastic resource - thank you very much, I'll certainly take a look!

[rhiannon_s]

Bernard Cornwell, an author who is known for doing very painstaking research, in one of his Sharpe books set in this period in the Peninsular War has his protagonist get such a wound and the treatment is just stitches and changing the dressings daily until it heals on its own. If infection develops, as it did in the book, then the fever is left to burn itself out with laudanum given as a painkiller. If it gets really life-threatening, kill or cure time, then the patient would be laid in a trough and have cold water poured on them from a height [or laid in a cold stream if there was nearby with clear water in it] in order to shock them out of it. That is a total last resort

[lothlaurien]

Thank you! This sounds like a perfect excuse to finally start reading the Sharpe novels!