Marvelous Recoveries from Multiple Injuries.--There are injuries
so numerous or so great in extent, and so marvelous in their
recovery, that they are worthy of record in a section by
themselves. They are found particularly in military surgery. In
the Medical and Philosophical Commentaries for 1779 is the report
of the case of a lieutenant who was wounded through the lungs,
liver, and stomach, and in whose armpit lodged a ball. It was
said that when the wound in his back was injected, the fluid
would immediately be coughed up from his lungs. Food would pass
through the wound of the stomach. The man was greatly prostrated,
but after eleven months of convalescence he recovered. In the
brutal capture of Fort Griswold, Connecticut, in 1781, in which
the brave occupants were massacred by the British, Lieutenant
Avery had an eye shot out, his skull fractured, the
brain-substance scattering on the ground, was stabbed in the
side, and left for dead; yet he recovered and lived to narrate
the horrors of the day forty years after.
A French invalid-artillery soldier, from his injuries and a
peculiar mask he used to hide them, was known as "L'homme a la
tete de cire." The Lancet gives his history briefly as follows:
During the Franco-Prussian War, he was horribly wounded by the
bursting of a Prussian shell.
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