Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 169, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1918 — Traumatic Shock, Harvard Medical Expert Finds Far Most Deadly in Trenches [ARTICLE]

Traumatic Shock, Harvard Medical Expert Finds Far Most Deadly in Trenches

Men rarely die of shell shock but they have been dying at the rate of 20,000 a year in the English and French armies alone as a result of a far snore deadly form of shock —traumatic shock, says the Atlantic Monthly. In fact, the latter is usually fatal when skilled assistance isnot at hand. Dr. William T. Porter of the Harvard medical school has. been sent into front line trenches in France to study this strange enemy in action. Traumatic shock, he found, usually follows a serious fracture of a major bone like the hip bone or multiple wounds through the sub-cu-taneous fat layer. . By experimenting, with injecting: olive oil into the veins of a cat Dr. Porter developed symptoms identical with those appearing in cases of traumatic shock, confirming his belief that fatty globules are released into the veins by certain wounds and these gradually clog up the halrlike.-Capil-laries of the brain until circulation ceases. Then began an interesting, series of experiments in the front line trenches in which Dr. Porter tried the experiment of giving carbon dioxide to freshly wounded men to prevent: shock. The poilus were delighted with /his tests and crowded around eagerly to watch the operation. All of these ' details, together with many keen and humorous reactions* of a trained observer in the war zone,, are set down in Dr. Porter’s recently published little book, “Shock at the Front.” In fact, one well known critic insists that the book, far from being a mere medical treatise, is* rather “a glimpse of the war done in sharp stroke by a physician who hfi» as pretty a technic with the pen as with the scalpel.”