26 CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 
surprising to notice the presence of favorable symptoms and ultimate improvement. In a few days 
the patient was landed at Plover Bay, Siberia, where he recovered sufficiently to start on foot for 
his home over a rugged mountain way 150 miles distant. 
Some weeks thereafter the Corwin happening to stop in at Plover Bay, | inquired of a native, 
remarkable for his whaleman’s English and apothegmatical way of putting things, whether my 
patient had got well, to which he replied, ‘Yes; small well.” I learned subsequently from a whal- 
ing vessel, on board which this man had made a visit at Saint Lawrence Bay, that he had entirely 
recovered from his wound, but still labored under the delusion that his life had been attempted by 
the captain of the Corwin. 
One ease of hermetical sealing of a wound of the foregoing description does not prove much, 
to be sure, and it is hardly necessary to advocate a subject that has been the oceasion of much 
discussion; but it does seem that the occlusive treatment, which has been sanctioned and prac- 
ticed by such masters as Guy de Chauliac, John de Vigo, Paré, Graefe, of Berlin, and others, has 
its virtues, notwithstanding a different and unwarrantable assumption put before the public in a 
late official publication. 
Wounds seem to heal uncommonly well in the Arctic, a fact doubtless owing to the highly 
ozonized condition of the atmosphere and the absence of disease germs and organic dust. It is 
noticeable both in man and animals. At King’s Island I saw a whale’s rib in which reunion had 
taken place after a fracture probably caused by a bomb lance, and I have also seen a bear with 
several reunited ribs which had been fractured by a musket ball that had previously passed through 
the skull. A fossil rib of a reindeer, taken from the mammoth cliff in Kotzebue Sound, likewise 
showed reunion after a fracture. 
Several extraordinary recoveries from scalp wounds, more extensive in character than 
anything of the kind I have ever seen in hospital or described in surgical works, came under my 
observation. One oceurred off the Siberian coast in an old Eskimo who denuded a large portion 
of the os frontis from a fall on the ice. Careful approximation of the edges of the wound and the 
application of a retentive bandage were followed by rapid healing unaccompanied by complications. 
But the two most notable ones were in Eskimo, who in encounters with bears had been pawed and 
terribly lacerated about the head and face—a favorite amusement of this animal when he gets a 
man in his clutches. The first fellow’s scalp, neck, and face, in the region of the parotid gland, 
were extensively mutilated; the second was similarly torn, with the additional loss of his left eye, 
and fracture of his inferior maxilla. Both men, though much deformed, had recovered without 
surgical assistance, and the wounds were well cicatrized. 
Occasional gunshot wounds, usually the result of accident, are also met with among the Eskimo. 
At Saint Lawrence Bay I saw an old man who had been struck by a ball which entered the left 
side of his face just under the zygomatie process, and, passing downwards, had emerged from the 
neck, in the vicinity of the right carotid artery. 
Among other things observed surgically were three cases of angular ankylosis of the knee 
joint, two oceurring in adults and one in a boy; a case of paraplegia, due to traumatic causes; a 
case of periostitis of the bones of the forearm, another of necrosis of the superior maxilla; several 
of tumors oceurring on the neck, and one case of hemorrhoids. The latter affection and boils are 
quite common, according to Mr. Nelson, who has spent some time at Saint Michael’s. Mr. Petroff 
tells me that he has seen among the Innuit population of the interior extensive serpiginous ulcers, 
which yielded readily to treatment; and has also noticed a great many instances of disabled 
extremities from the effects of frost-bite. Among the more northern Eskimo, however, it appears 
that frost-bites are extremely rare. I have never seen an instance, and this observation seems to 
aceord with the experience of others. More rare still is the occurrence of malformation, deformity, 
or idiotcy. Whether the Spartan rule obtains relative to the destruction of weak or deformed 
infants, I am unable to say. However that may be, I can recall but a single instance in which 
there was observed anything approaching to deformity, and that was a girl with a supernumerary 
digit. 
Skin diseases, principally of the vesicular and squamous varieties, were found to prevail 
extensively, a fact not to be wondered at, since they are just the diseases the medical man would 
expect to see developed in subjects among whom are recognized the conditions most favorable to 
