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398 ILLUSTRATED WORLD
Making a Drawing of a Wound
achievement, by a long way. Something
even more marvellous, at least to the
mind of the layman, was yet to be done.
Dr. Carrel loves to complete a job—to
do it up brown, work out every detail,
get every last point exactly in order.
Accordingly, now that he had worked
out this method, he wanted exact and
complete conclusions concerning it; and
since nothing to him is impossible, he
instantly made a demand that was appalling
in its boldness. He summoned in
a Monsieur Pierre Lecomte du Nuoy, a
brilliant young physicist and mathematician,
handed him the huge mass of data
covering the history of every case
treated, and demanded that the young
man furnish some law, some formula,
by which the history of any wound
treated by the process could be predicted.
A stupendous task it was, but du Nuoy
accomplished it—worked out superbly.
Before long, his genius had evolved a
mathematical formula and a chart, and
these two embodied the complete solution
of the problem. The chart was ruled off
into squares, the horizontal lines from
top to bottom representing
decreasing areas of wounds
in square centimeters, and
the vertical lines from left
to right being marked by
decimal figures—the "Index
of Cicatrization", these figures
were called. On the
chart were plotted curves,
each curve being marked
with an age in years.
Now when a wounded
man comes in, the area of
his wound is measured by
laying over a sterilized sheet
of transparent celluphane,
tracing the shape of the
wound, and then measuring
the area of the tracing. A
pointer is then run out along
the corresponding horizontal
"area" line to the point
where the line cuts the curve
for the age of the patient. A
vertical line then is dropped
to the base- —and the particular decimal
it strikes is the "Index of Cicatrization"
for that wound. The "index" is inserted
in the formula, and the formula is
worked out. The answer is—the number
of days the wound will take to heal and
how much it will heal day by day. And
every wound so far has healed on
schedule time!
The value of this method is stupendous.
A curve is plotted for every
patient who comes in, and the chart is
kept for comparison with actual results.
If on some one day, the healing process has
not progressed as far as the chart shows
it should have, the attending surgeon
becomes watchful. If next day it lags
behind the same amount or more, he
knows that something is wrong, and immediately
sets to work on the task of
finding and eliminating the trouble. No
such instantaneous warning is given by
anything previously known to the healing
sciences, and the advantage of possessing
it is obvious to everyone who has
had the slightest experience in hospital
or field medical and surgical affairs.