igoo-i.] Den^ Surgery. 23 



rupture has been so serious that it results in a complete protrusion of 

 the abdominal viscera. Such cases are always fatal here. Unable 

 to effect a cure, the Denes try to alleviate the sufferings of the patient 

 by means of an eagle or goose quill, slightly cut at the end, and stuck 

 in the outward excrescence. This serves as a duct for the purulent 

 matter which is usually formed in the vicinity of the rupture. 



Incredible as it may seem, I never heard of any case of inguinal 

 hernia, and the natives I questioned on that subject profess to be 

 ignorant thereof 



Gunshot wounds are now treated first by sucking out the fine 

 soot-like residue generally concomitant with the tearing of flesh by 

 a projectile from a fire-arm, after which the shots or ball are extracted 

 if possible, the wound carefully washed and finally covered with some 

 emollient medicinal herbs. 



I have said that amputation was unknown among the Northern 

 Denes. This is strictly true as regards surgical operations ; but, 

 among the Sekanais, there was another kind of amputation which 

 was often practised, especially by the women. This consisted in the 

 voluntary cutting off of a finger or of part thereof as an outward sign 

 of extreme grief, anger or resentment. It was resorted to mostly on 

 the occasion of the death of a beloved child, sometimes upon the loss of 

 a kind husband and, more seldom, in cases of disappointed love. 

 More than one mother went even further, and did not hestitate to 

 horribly lacerate the breasts her dead offspring had sucked, as a mark 

 of her disgust that she should be left alive after the object of her 

 affection was gone.* Not long ago there died among the Sekanais, 

 who trade their peltries at Fort McLeod, a woman who is said to 

 have had but two fingers left intact. Even here, at Stuart's Lake, 

 we have among the Carriers, a Sekanais woman whose shortened 

 index attests the intensity of her past troubles. On such occasions 

 a common axe replaces the surgical knife. 



The treatment of incipient deformities is hardly more serious than 

 that of fractures. As a matter of fact, in most cases it is commenced 

 too late and stopped too soon to be of much benefit. As with 

 fractures, pieces of birch bark, with the addition occasionally of 

 wooden splinters, are kept very tight over the spine or the diseased 



* Such outward marks of sorrow recall facts recorded in the history of barbarous nations. Thus we 

 read that, at the death of Attila, his followers manifested their sense of the loss they had suffered by 

 lacerating themselves with knives. 



