Canada Lancet (Volume 30) (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: MEDICINE. IN CHARGE OF N. A. POWELL, M.D., Professor of Medical Jurisprudence and Lecturer on Clinical Surgery, Trinity Medical College; Surgeon to the Hospital for Sick Children, and to the Extern Department Toronto General Hospital; Professor of Surgery, Ontario Medical College for Women. 167 College St.; and WILLIAM BRITTON, M.D., 17 Isabella Street. FIVE SUCCESSFUL CASES OF GENERAL SUPPURATIVE PERITONITIS TREATED BY A NEW METHOD. BY J. M. T. FINNEY, M.D., ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SURGERY, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. Recovery following laparotomy for purulent peritonitis is unfortunately of sufficient rarity to excite interest whenever it occurs. My object in making this report to the Society is two-fold; first, to record five successful cases of laparotomy for general suppurative peritonitis, all treated by the same method; and second, to describe briefly the method itself. The principle involved is not a new one; only in the manner of carrying it out is there any originality claimed. Since the appearance in 1877 of the classical work of Wegner, and later that of Grawitz and others, it has been known that the healthy peritoneum is capable of disposing of a considerable amount of infectious material. J. G. Clark, in a recent article, reviews the literature of the subject, and gives the conclusions reached by the experimenters in this direction. All agree that the peritoneum is able under favorable conditions to take up a relatively large amount of infectious material and dispose of it effectually. These observers were dealing with a more or less healthy peritoneum. On opening the abdomen of a patient suffering from general suppurative peritonitis, however, we have very different conditions with which to deal. The observations of Pawlowsky ...