Curran mentions a British officer in India who,
being overheated, stopped at a station bath in which the previous
night he had had a plunge, and without examining, took a violent
"header" into the tank, confidently expecting to strike from
eight to ten feet of water. He dashed his head against the
concrete bottom 12 feet below (the water two hours previously
having been withdrawn) and crushed his brain and skull into an
indistinguishable mass.
There are many cases on record in which an injury, particularly a
gunshot wound of the skull, though showing no external wound, has
caused death by producing a fracture of the internal table of the
cranium. Pare gives details of the case of a nobleman whose head
was guarded by a helmet and who was struck by a ball, leaving no
external sign of injury, but it was subsequently found that there
was an internal fracture of the cranium. Tulpius and Scultetus
are among the older writers reporting somewhat similar instances,
and there are several analogous cases reported as having occurred
during the War of the Rebellion. Boling reports a case in which
the internal table was splintered to a much greater extent than
the external.
Fracture of the base of the skull is ordinarily spoken of as a
fatal injury, reported instances of recovery being extremely
rare, but Battle, in a paper on this subject, has collected
numerous statistics of nonfatal fracture of the base of the
brain, viz.
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