A detailed example of good low tech surgery

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by tantric

Another weird bit - I'm fairly convinced East Africans invented drinking straws, I have another ethnography that tells of the 'peculiar habit of drinking their beer through hollow reeds...."

Didn't the Egyptians do that? If you've got a beer that has a high proportion of solids in it, you need some kind of drinking aid ... Europeans seem to have used strainers. Also, I seem to recall something similar being used in the Pacific area for drinking palm toddy but I may be wrong...

[tantric]

Also:

The wounded were carried home with the army and if a
man's wounds were not serious, he was looked after by his
wife in his own kraal and the wife had to be strictly chaste
until he recovered. A sick man might be fed on milk warmed
by adding hot water, though milk might never be boiled.
More seriously wounded men were also brought home, but
they were looked after by surgeons and nursed by some old
woman who was a widow or by a woman who had had no
sexual connexion with men for some time.

The surgeon took leaves of ekitobotobo or ntengo and laid
them on stones heated in the kraal fire. When the sap flowed
from the hot leaves they were applied to the wound until it
appeared clean and healthy. If a wound was very unhealthy,
the surgeon heated a spear and thrust it inside to burn away
the bad place and stop bleeding. To stop excessive bleeding
in a limb, a pad of fibre was placed over the wound and a
bandage bound tightly round. A barbed arrow or spear which
was left in a wounded limb was forced through and no
attempt made to draw it back. A special surgeon (abagyengi)
was called in to treat bone fractures. In the case of a broken
limb he applied some herbs, bound the limb to splints, and
kept it thus until the fracture had healed. In the case of a
skull fracture, the surgeon removed any splinters of bone,
bound herbs over the wound and left it to heal. From time
to time he put on fresh herbs, using kinds which he had found
by experience to have healing properties, though he knew
nothing of their antiseptic action.

When the wounds had healed, the old woman took the
man to some waste land near, where she washed him from
head to foot with fresh water and purified him with the
herbs mwetengo and omubuza and then with nyawera. She
then put new clothes upon him, taking the old as her per-
quisite. After this purification the man returned to his wife
and family.

From Roscoe's The Banyankole

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by tantric

More true than you know - all of this was lost. I also found an early ethnography that tells of a village in East Africa where the people kept ostriches as pets - meaning possible domestication, but when rinderpest swept through the area and all the livestock died, everything else got eaten.
......."

Some people in Africa keep hyenas as "pets". That's doesn't make them domesticated at all.

[Agemegos]

I've done a bit of checking. My eldest brother confirms that he was born by Caesarian section in 1949. But it was at the Macleay District Hospital, not in Sydney. The surgeon was one of my father's professional partners, probably Bill Campbell or perhaps Ian Barrie. My brother recalls seeing his own record at the hospital when he was practising there.

My brother says that VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarian) used to be the rule, and that routinely doing "caesar after caesar" was an emerging practice when he was studying obstetrics, because of evidence of a slight increase in risks in VBAC. A nut for evidence-based medicine, he questions the practice.

By the way, my brother was very interested in the story of the caesar in Uganda in 1879, and is keen to bring it to the attention of his professional association.

[quarkstomper]

My wife had to have a Cesaerian due to a late miscarriage back in 2000. In her next pregnancy, a few years later, she really wanted a VBAC, because as painful as live birth is, she preferred it to the recovery period after a C-Section and the chances of a post-op infection like the one she got after the first one. Her smarmy doctor made vague reassuring noises at her and, in effect, patted her on the head and told her not to worry her pretty little head about it.

As the pregnancy progressed, she pressed him on the subject, and he told her flat out that they wouldn't do a VBAC because of hospital's policy. We got the strong impression that the policy was because a Live Birth can't be scheduled and that the Bean Counters in the Office didn't like them. They would have to have an anestheologist on call in case the delivery went wrong and they'd need to do the C-Section anyway.

My wife didn't like this, so she went to another doctor in town for a second opinion. He, at least, gave us some medical justification. He said that some VBACs are reasonably safe, if the original C-Section used a "bikini cut" incision. My wife's procedure did not use a bikini cut and so, the doctor said, a VBAC would be riskier in her case, and he would not do it.

My wife did some more research and found that the closest clinic that would agree to a VBAC was in Milwaukee, some 60 miles away -- a little farther than I'd like to travel if my wife is going into labor in the car seat beside me.

So my wife assented to another C-Section. She didn't like it, but we didn't have much choice. Afterwards, at her first opportunity, she got an IUD so she wouldn't have to do this another time.

Sometime later we heard that her obstetrician had left gynecology and become a plastic surgeon. He wasn't missed.