Yale Medical Journal (Volume 2) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SUN GLASS AS A SURGICAL INSTRUMENT. Geo. R. Shepherd, M.D. Hartford, Conn. Some twenty-five years ago the late Dr. Freeman, of Collins - ville, said to me, as we met and exchanged our morning greetings: "The 'Solar Ray Doctor' is down in the shops, suppose we go and see what he is doing?" Accordingly, we repaired to the shops of The Collins Company, and found a man of rather rough and unprepossessing appearance, with an ordinary sun glass in his hand concentrating the solar rays upon a wart that had for a long time disfigured the face of one of the company's employees. As the sun warmed the patient up he made some rather emphatic utterances, and objected to the procedure, but the doctor (?) was unflinching in his preseverance and kept up the application for a good part of a minute, possibly a little longer. Under this treatment the wart smoked and crackled, until what had been a brownish protuberance of the size of a white bean had been contracted and hardened into a black, charred mass. In the course of a week or ten days I looked up this man, and found simply a red, slightly depressed spot where the wart had been, the crust having separated without suppuration. A month later no scar nor depression was visible, and the blemish had been entirely removed. Of course this interested me very much, and some time later. when I had a suitable case, I used the sun glass for the removal of a small growth upon the under eyelid of a patient. The result was all that could have been desired and no scar nor contraction remained. From that time to the present I have occasionally made use of this method for the cure of nevi of small size, whether of the vascular or pigmentary variety, as well as for the small lipomatous growths known as moles. The pinkish maculae, commonly called...