Medicine: Wonder of Nature

The 17-year-old Arab girl had no business to be still alive : when Captain W. W. Wilson of the Royal Army Medical Corps first saw her, she had been shot in the abdomen eight days before and the wide wound, leaking intestinal contents, was untended except for a packing of tow, a dressing of mud and torn clothing. Ordinarily, such an untreated wound means peritonitis (infection of the abdominal lining) and almost inevitable death. Yet the girl had not even a fever.

In last week’s Lancet, Captain Wilson explained her amazing survival: on opening the wound — it ran from her left side a little above the waist to a spot near her navel — he found that the shilling-sized hole nicked out of her intestine had be come fixed against the corresponding hole in her abdominal wall, so that no contaminating material could touch the vulnerable abdominal lining. Such material trickled out through the wound, where it could do comparatively little harm. Wrote the Captain admiringly: “In her successful management of this case, Nature endorses the principles at present advocated for the immediate surgical treatment of such an injury.” All that remained to be done was to separate gut and abdominal wall, stitch up the gut, clean and dress the wound. In three weeks, the patient went home and, six months later, was perfectly healthy.