NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month!

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Comments

[thomasvye]

I can tell you (or v. easily find out) anything you need to know about 18th century French surgery....

(I am a professional medical historian, you know! ^-^)

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<3 <3 <3 You are so awesome! If I continue the story, I guess I can have my poor characters get injured left and right without worrying whether they'd be able to survive such wounds in the 18th century. Thank you so much for the support!! <3

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Actually, I'm in need of your expertise already! ^^;;;

So... it turns out one of my characters gets stabbed in the chest (shoulder, above heart), so I figured the kind-hearted ppl who find him would take him to a surgeon to ... sew it up? Cauterize it? Check for internal bleeding? What else does an 18th century French surgeon do when a man with a bad stab wound is brought to him? Did they even have surgeons in 18th century France? ^^;; (and what would they call him? Do they work only for the king (this is pre-Revolutionary France), or would there be private-practice ones, too? Also, say the above kind-hearted person who found the guy is a noble lady who is currently staying at Versailles--would there have been physicians there?

Also, any sort of usual treatments/follow-up nurses (were there nurses back then??) would have administered to him while he's recovering?

Sorry if there are some really stupid-sounding questions in here... I'm so uninformed... ;__; But thank you so much for offering to help me! ^___^<3

[thomasvye]

Not stupid at all; firstly, most certainly there were surgeons. In fact, Paris had the reputation for being one of the world's centres of medical education. Over the course of the 18th century, as in England, young surgeons were trained in the city's hospitals after the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris lost it's control over surgical training. The jealous physicians of that college had managed to get the distinction between surgeons and barbers blurred in the 1600s, but in the 18th century French surgeons, about a decade earlier than their English bretheren, freed themselves from this association. In 1768, the surgeons abandoned the old apprenticeship system and replaced it with compulsary attendance at the Collége Chirurgie for students

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WOW, Thomas-san, you have no idea how helpful that was! Thank you so much for all this info~~ definitely better to ask a pro than to go bumbling around internet articles myself! ^_________^ I *bet* Napoleon had a good surgeon--so vital for such a successful war machine, eh? And now I know: no sutures, yes surgeons at Versailles, yes painkillers, no hospital recovery, no hospital nurses, and no cauterizing. Good, good

[thomasvye]

Not to worry at all! Surgeons *did* use sutures, but could be conservative with them, because of their concerns about infection (and because they would look for natural healing; what Astley Cooper called 'natural adhesion' where a wound closes itself from the inside out, naturally). With a stabbing wound, I think they would have been more likely to approximate (bring close together) the edges of the tissue with adheisve straps and support it with bandages

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WAH! Thomas-san, you have done some MARVELOUS stuff for me here!! *___* Sorry for not getting back to you in so long--I've been having trouble finishing/revising that surgery excerpt I was going to ask you to take a look at. Thank you so much for all the research (and the illustration--you can't even find a nice pic of a lancet like that on wikipedia~). I'll probably incorporate bloodletting into Emile's convalescence, but during the surgery... hmm, I don't know if it would quite fit (or be as painful as Emile describes it). Not to mention, the surgeon wouldn't be bloodletting from his gaping stab wound, right? ^^; Well, I'll let you read the passage, and hopefully you'll have an idea of what to substitute for the scalpel (or possibly, a reason to be using a scalpel in such a surgery to begin with

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Without further ado, the excerpt