Note 807 — ON INJURIES OF THE HEAD.

Our author delivers the same doctrine in the work On the Articulations, and states that extensive fractures of the bones are often less dangerous than others which appear not so formidable. I need scarcely remark that modern experience has confirmed the truth of this position. How often has it been seen that one patient died from a slight injury to the skull, while another recovered from an extensive fracture of it? Mr. Guthrie appears in so far to agree in opinion with our author, that extensive fractures are less dangerous than they appear; he says, “Mr. Keate, who has had great opportunities for observation in St. George’s Hospital, has invariably remarked that the symptoms dependent on extravasation have been less severe in the first instance, in proportion as the separation of the edges of the fracture have been greater one from the other, or when the sutures have yielded to the shock and have been separated. It has been stated from the earliest antiquity, that the greater the fracture, the less the concussion of the brain.” (p. 56.) See the Argument.