132 VETERINARY SURGICAL THERAPEUTICS. 
partly filled with granulations, the drain is removed. With deep sup- 
purating solutions of continuity of the superior regions of the body, free 
incisions or counter-openings are often required. 
A simpler treatment, used for numerous superficial wounds, consists 
in washing them several times a day with salt and water and covering 
them with absorbing or antiseptic powders (those of coal, coal-tar, 
camphor, tannin, alone or mixed with iodoform). But until these 
wounds are entirely covered with a coat of granulations, infectious com- 
plications are to be feared. The surest way to prevent them is to make 
a free use of microbicide solutions, 
II. 
WOUNDS FROM PRICKING OBJECTS. (PUNCTURED 
WOUNDS). 
The gravity of these depends especially upon the tissues or organs 
that are involved, and upon the size, form, and aseptic or infected state 
of the injuring object. Pricking bodies with sharp points, fine and 
smooth edges, penetrate while separating the anatomical elements, 
which are destroyed in small number only, and the phenomena fol- 
lowing are simple. The innocuity of exploring punctures made with 
trocars or needles of small dimension is well known, there is a like 
simplicity of phenomena following subcutaneous -operation, wounds 
which have decided analogies with pricks from two points of view—the 
way they occur, and their character and mode of repair. Let us recall 
again to memory the cases where people have implanted a number of 
needles deeply in certain regions, without any accident following. It: 
is also known that needles, unthreaded, which are swallowed, can pass: 
through the walls of the digestive tube and travel through viscera with- 
out doing any serious mischief; in dogs and cats, it is not rare to find 
encysted in viscera or in the tissues, needles whose presence was never 
suspected on account of the absence of all pathological manifestations. 
It is very different when the needle carries a thread, since it bears with 
it infectious elements which give rise to septic complications. 
If larger points, conical or prismatic, enter also the tissues and 
‘separate their elements, they compress them more, and easily lacerate 
them. Bodies with blunt or ragged points, those whose edges are 
rough, bruise and lacerate the organs, and make a lesion with contused. 
walls and an irritated zone which may afterwards mortify. The wound- 
ing agent may open a vein, an artery, a synovial sac, or one of the 
great serous membranes, and may break into the tissues. Often it is 
soiled and loaded with phlogogenous or septic germs, so much the more 
serious as the tissues are more delicate. Infected pricks of aponeuroses, 
ligaments, tendons or bones, ordinarily, are followed by limited necrosis 
