578 
ON WOUNDS PENETRATING INTO THE CHEST 
OF THE HORSE. 
EXPERIMENTS MADE WITH A VIEW TO ILLUSTRATE TIIEIR CONSEQUENCES 
AND THE PROPER TREATMENT OF THEM. 
By MM. U. Leblanc, V.S ., and A. Trosseau, M.D. 
The opinions of medical men with regard to wounds penetrat¬ 
ing into the chest have been so discordant, and veterinary authors 
.have said so little on this division of surgery, that we have 
thought it our duty to institute some experiments in order to 
facilitate the study of these lesions, and to determine the best 
curative treatment of them. All our experiments have been 
made upon the horse. We have preferred him because, on ac¬ 
count of his docility, we have been able to operate on him with 
the accuracy we could wish, and because he did not, like other 
animals, attempt to rid himself of the bandages which we put 
upon him. 
We inflicted the wounds with different instruments. In each 
series of experiments we varied the form of the wound, and we 
used vulneraries differently composed, and applied in different 
ways. We thus arranged the course of our experiments :— 
1. Simple wounds penetrating the parietes of the thorax , hut 
without the introduction of air into the pleural cavities . 
If we had not wished to render our inquiries as complete as 
possible, we should have dispensed with experimenting on this 
variety of penetrating wounds, for it is easy to see that they could 
not be attended with any danger. These wounds are rarely met 
with in practice, and without great care is used it is difficult 
to make them without lacerating the pulmonary tissue. In order 
to pierce the parietes of the thorax without wounding the lung, 
we made at first an incision with a bistoury, reaching to the 
pleura, and then we divided that membrane with a probe, to 
which we gave an oblique direction, that it might glide over the 
lung without wounding that viscus. But, whatever precaution 
we took, we could never make a wound as simple as we desired. 
There was always some exposure of the pleura. The probe 
having once entered the chest, we withdrew it as speedily as 
we could, taking care to keep the two edges of the incision 
through the skin as close together as possible, in order to pre¬ 
vent the entrance of the air. We finished the experiment by 
closing the wound by the hare-lip suture. We repeated this expe¬ 
riment several times on the same horse without observing the 
slightest derangement in the function of respiration. The wounds 
healed very quickly, and almost always by the first intention. 
