Wyatt Wolfman:
Surgery in the Colonial period was just becoming its own field and forming its own identity from other medical jobs. With science and religion becoming increasingly separated, surgery was becoming less like religious, medical jobs like the physick. “Surgeons made up another category of trained healer. Surgery and medicine were considered separate fields, although the lines were beginning to blur and would eventually disappear altogether. Medicine, or ‘physick,’ was an intellectual, gentlemen’s skill; surgery was a manual trade, and thus had lower status. Many surgeons learned their skill in the military and continued to practice after their discharge. They set broken bones, removed cataracts, and amputated diseased or injured limbs.” (Tannenbaum, Rebecca J. “Health and Medicine in the 17th Century.” American Centuries, vol. 2, Facts on File, 2014). This quote is referring to two of the primary medical jobs: surgery and physick. Even when religion was more important than science, surgery was still crucial. People knew that surgery helped, but they still thought that it was often unnecessary and only God’s blessing was needed. As science quickly closed the gap, surgery and physick became more and more similar in the Colonial Era. This happened because physick became less and less about religion and more about medicine. Physick would eventually turn into the apothecary. With the rise of surgery, there were more surgeons, and more surgeons meant more tools needed to be made.
Miles Friedman
Surgeons in the Colonial Era came from many different backgrounds; there was not a singular pathway to becoming a surgeon. For instance, people came from many different backgrounds, including becoming a surgeon because that was the family trade, attending medical school, and being a general apprentice in a shop. Even though these people would come from many different backgrounds they would still learn the same material from their experienced surgeons. Surgeons came from many different social classes. In the town, surgeons were usually from the middling class, but on the battlefield, they could come from any background. Surgeons were hard workers because they did not make a lot of money, and would take jobs outside of medicine and surgery to support their families. For example, sometimes your surgeon would be a dentist or barber in order to make more money to help their family economically. But the English did not have enough of these hardworking surgeons. Sometimes surgeons were more preferred than others, and higher quality surgeons had more patients. This resulted in surgeons having higher ranks. They were devoted to saving people’s lives, and knew that once they got in the career of surgery the only way they would make a lot of money was by getting to the top. This meant that surgeons had to be willing to dedicate a lot of time and effort to become a surgeon. One of the ways people became surgeons in the colony was by general apprenticeship.
Lindsay O. 2015
Because sickness and disease was common, and people often died because of it, it lowered the average life expectancy. The Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans all had different ideas and beliefs about healing ailments and disease. But when they were brought together in one area, the colony of Virginia, they affected and changed each other more than they thought. Africans had relied on herbalism, but when meeting the Europeans they changed some of their beliefs. The Europeans changed when the met the Native Americans because they used little herbs and natural products before coming to the New World. Surprisingly, the Natives really didn’t change when the new cultures came over, they stayed secluded in the woods, not often making contact with the different cultures. Think about it, if there had been no medicine, none at all, then we would have died off. The world would be human-free, almost no pollution, and the ozone layer would be strong. It would be paradise. So which would you choose a world of paradise without humans? Or the world that we have today with humans, but also with pollution?
Willem S
2015
What happens if you push your finger or any tool too deep into the gun wound? What should you do if there is gangrene in the area? How do you remove the splinters, cloth etc from the wound? Are there tools that work best for this specific procedure? Does different areas of the wound affect the procedure or not? How do you seal the wound? What if the patient is loosing blood too quickly? What should you do if you can’t find the ball? Is it necessary to cut off the blood from that area of the body during that specific procedure? Do you sterilize to tools before this procedure, or any? It seems that gunshot wounds are the most fatal of all types of wounds. It takes in splinters and pieces of clothes which affect the wound and makes it more difficult to cure. I think that depending on where you are shot, like the stomach affects if you can save the person or not. A shot to the stomach, would probably tear you major arteries and anything inside, not just tearing flesh. Gangrene would possibly mean amputation, but gangrene in the stomach, I would guess would mean death. There’s nothing to separate except flesh. I think it would be better to push your finger into the bullet hole first to search for a bullet, because you can feel what you’re touching inside. it would be fairly more difficult to feel the bullet with a probe. Anything which keeps the patient in less pain, is effective. I think that in that time period, they wouldn’t sterilize their tools because they hadn’t yet discovered germs, therefore meaning that they won’t sterilize their tools, but just wipe the blood off. I think if you were shot by a bullet, you would probably have about a 15%-20% of surviving because sticking anything into a wound with germs would add bacteria into the wound, witch would make the flesh decay, causing gangrene, which would eventually lead to death. But, if you were lucky, you would just have a large hole in your body once the bullet is out, or you would just have to amputate your limb. So I think that means you wouldn’t want to be shot by a bullet.