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MARVELOUS NEW CURE
FOR BURNS
T H O S E who have received
terrible burns no longer need
be disfigured. Every scrap of
skin may be restored. Moreover,
the healing will be complete.
No scar will be visible. All this,
too, without suffering to the patient, for
the moment the remedy is applied all
pain vanishes.
This miracle of miracles is being
daily—very nearly hourly—performed at
St. Nicholas Hospital at Issy-les-Moulineaux,
just outside of Paris. The institution
serves as a place for the treatment
of the badly burned. Mild injuries
are not treated here; only the more
severe cases are admitted. Last year
four hundred fifty startling cures were
effected.
Dr. William O'Neill Sherman, surgeon
for the United States Steel Corporation,
is one of the American surgeons
who have seen the treatment and the
results of it at St. Nicholas. Dr. Sherman,
it is stated, hopes to try out this
treatment in the cases of employes in the
mills of the United States Steel Corporation
who have received bad burns.
Now as to the method of treatment:
Usually the soldiers who are brought
in are from the front. Sometimes some
preliminary treatment has been given.
Bandages, at least, cover the wounds.
It may have been two or three days previously,
however, that the injuries were
received. The first thing that the nurse
does—and most of this work can be
done by nurses—is to remove the bandages
and such parts of the skin as are
loose. The pus and other foreign matter
is washed out with a hose, and the flesh
is dried with an electric hot air apparatus.
Then the surface of the flesh is
sprayed with a solution of paraffin and
resin that has been heated to about 158
degrees Fahrenheit. Next the affected
5X2
parts are swathed in cotton batting and
this in turn is painted over, by means
of a brush, with the hot paraffin-resin
compound. The wound is effectually
sealed from all contact with the air by
this waxy covering.
If the patient has previously been suffering,
his pain vanishes. He rests
quietly for twenty-four hours, until the
bandages are removed and the flesh
again exposed. Because of the foreign
substances that had previously forced
their way into the flesh at the time of,
or after the injury, more pus will be
found to have been secreted. In any
event the surface is again thoroughly
sprayed with water. If decomposition
has set in owing to exposure of the
wounded man before he was rescued
from the enemy's fire, boiled water or a
mild antiseptic is used. The coat of
wax, of course, at once stops the decomposition.
Each day that the wound is exposed
and washed the coating of wax is put on
afresh. In a few days it will be discovered
that the skin is renewing itself.
The electric drier is necessary because
the coating of wax cannot form properly
if any moisture intervenes. Also the
patient would feel the hot liquid. It is a
curious thing that only when by chance
the skin receives a drop of the curative
agent is the patient aware that the preparation
is intensely heated.
The wounded are men who have been
scorched by shells bursting in their
faces, scalded by the boiling water or
oil which is sometimes used in the defense
of trenches by the Germans, or by
liquid fire. They are therefore the most
desperate cases. The success achieved
in the treatment of these men will doubtless
prove ultimately of great value to
industry throughout the world—in peace
time as well as in war.