WOUNDS IN THIS WAR.

Clutha Leader, Volume XLII, Issue 88, 12 May 1916, Page 1

WOUNDS IN THIS WAR.

WORST EVER KNOWN. Wounds inflicted in the present war are far more serious than in any previous modern war, declares Sir Anthony Bowlby, the King's surgeon, who treated King George after his recent accident in France, and nothing is more astonishing than the damage done by very small fragments of high explosive shell. Lecturing to the Royal College of Surgeon*. Sir Anthony Bowlby showed how a bomb barely as'big as a baseball exploded into -hundreds of pieces ranging from large fragments to a kind of thick dust. He illustrated this by a filial showing the number of fragments from a British bomb exploded under water to preserve the pieces. Thirty thousand of these bombs, said Sir Anthony, were -used by the British in the attack on the Hohenzollern redoubt, and each of them cost a dollar to manufacture.

Wounds inflicted by modern projectiles. he said, could in no way be compared with those- of the Boer War. The bullets of the South African battles produced much less smashing and rending wounds than the pointed bullets of-to-day. Wounds from shell fire, not very frequent in South Africa, were now as numerous a» those inflicted by bullets. The injuries seen in the Boer War were infinitely less severe and the complications due to them far fewer and less serious than those of the past year in' France.

11l dealing with the effects of sh"ll fire wounds, the royal surgeon .said the wounds were such as lie had never .seen in the worst, machinery accidents of civil life. He had seen gaping wounds as large as a clenched fist caused by quite small fragments, which evidently owed their iwwer of destruction to the extraordinary velocity with which they travelled, and to their ragged edgon. This .lending asunder was the special characteristic of all typical gunshot, wounds, and it. had been shown that the injury caused by the bullet was wholly due to the wave of compressed air which the bullet drove in front of it ami which expanded within the tissues. ''l think. 1 ' said Sir Antliouv, "that the thing that would strike most forcibly any observant person brought into a room filled with a large number of bounded men just brought down from a big fight is that nearly all of them are asleep in spite of wounds which one would think would cause Mich suffering as to render sleep impossible." An extraordinary operation has just been performed on a wounded British soldier at Sunderland hospital. When at the front a piece of shrapnel struck him in the head and dislodged a piece of bone. The Sunderland surgeons took strips of bone from the patient's shin and filled them into the skull cavity, which was 3in by 4Jin, The new bone knitted with that of the skull, and the patient rapidly recovered, He is now walking about with no sign of his injury except for the scar on his head l .