Even though making all due allowance for the elasticity, strong coat, mobility, and form of the arteries, it is yet difficult to understand how they escape injury in as they do. The rarity of primary haemorrhage on the field of battle has been long remarked, and yet how often do we meet with ball wounds apparently through the course of a great vessel! The veins are more easily cut than the arteries, and primary haemorrhage, when it does occur, proceeds more commonly from them. Some vessels are more liable to injury from balls than others. Thus, those firmly tied down, or lying on bone, are more subject to damage than those loosely reposing on the soft tissues. This remark applies especially to two vessels, the femoral as it passes over the brim of the pelvis, and the popli>T WOUNDS ANI> THK1U TKMATM KNT.
11"). when it lies on the head of the til tin. The lower parts <>f tinulnar, the radial, and the facial, where it turns over the jaw, are subject to injury from tin- same 'ii. An artery has in it rarely lieen opened by a ilum of bone detached by a ball which had itseh I the artery. The -<;itfrfc course often pursued by balls has been a frcfjuent subject of remark, and though we had many most striking instances of this, still I suspect we have had less of it than occurred in the experience of former I. The conieal ball seldom tails to take the shortest cut through a cavity or limb, and it has at times been seen (as at the Alma' to pass through the bodies of two and lodge in that of the third.
But of the wanderI round hall there were many illustrations. 1 have known it enter above the elbow, and be removed tin- opposite axilla; and in another ease it en<>v<tinspimof tl.i;<ula. i: and M.
Mmiere, in hi- account tells us Of a ball which entered at the inner angle ye, parsed downwards, backwards, mid t<> th.s.iuni, and was removed above the slioult MMI. was no liv in this case, ile was curious. upper arm of a man ascending a scaling-ladder, was found half-way down the thigh of the opposite side. The fact of this wandering, however, is a peculiarity in the wounding agent difficult. Foreign bodies, as pieces of cloth or part of the soldier's accoutrements, are often far more troublesome when introduced into a wound than the ball which occasioned their presence there. Innumerable and most heterogeneous have been the foreign bodies thus forced into wounds; but those which are capable of acting chemically as well as mechanically, are the worst of all.
Of these, lime, pieces of copper, &c., are the most frequently met with. Round lead balls are, perhaps, from their nature and shape, the least noxious of any, and are most likely to become encysted in the tissues. Few questions connected with gun-shot wounds have given rise to so much discussion and diversity of opinion as that with reference to the extraction of balls. For my own part I have seen enough to make me subscribe, with all sincerity, to Begin' s precept, when he says in his communication to the Academy: " Selon moi 1'indication de leur extraction est toujours presente, toujours le chirurgeon doit chercher a la remplir; mais il doit le faire avec la prudence et la measure que la raison conseille.