Wound care in regency England

[lothlaurien]

Hello! I was just wondering if anyone would happen to know anything about wound care towards the end of the regency period, round about 1820. I have two characters, both medical students at Oxford University (so they have some medical training/knowledge), one of whom has received a deep cut on the chest from a sharp ring in a fight - the kind that

Comments

[rhiannon_s]

Bernard Cornwell, an author who is known for doing very painstaking research, in one of his Sharpe books set in this period in the Peninsular War has his protagonist get such a wound and the treatment is just stitches and changing the dressings daily until it heals on its own. If infection develops, as it did in the book, then the fever is left to burn itself out with laudanum given as a painkiller. If it gets really life-threatening, kill or cure time, then the patient would be laid in a trough and have cold water poured on them from a height [or laid in a cold stream if there was nearby with clear water in it] in order to shock them out of it. That is a total last resort.

Maggot cleaning is also mentioned in another of his books. Basically a number of maggots would be placed into an open infected wound, left for a few days, then the wound would be uncovered and the maggots removed after having eaten the dead and diseased flesh. The key was to count the number of maggots placed in the wound, and made sure the same number was counted back out again. Maggot therapy is still used today, albeit under more clinical conditions.

Given how thorough Cornwell is with his research, I'd believe those were period treatments.

[lothlaurien]

Thank you! This sounds like a perfect excuse to finally start reading the Sharpe novels!