wounded. It excited my compassion strongly to hear the cries of those who were thus subjected to great additional suffering, and I could not help wishing that I had never left Paris. Once actually in the city, I began to look around for a stable in which the horses of myself and my orderly might find shelter. The one I entered contained the corpses of four soldiers who had presumably died there, and three badly wounded men who were still alive, but whose faces were greatly disfigured by the wounds which they had received, and who—as we soon learned—were unable to see, hear or speak. An old soldier who entered the stable at that moment, and whose pity was excited by what he saw, asked me if it would be possible to save the lives of the men who were so badly injured. I replied "No." He thereupon proceeded, without the least excitement and with due gentleness, to cut the throats of all three. At the sight of this act, of what seemed to me to be great cruelty, I exclaimed, "You are a wicked man!" His reply was: "I pray God that, if it should ever be my fate to be situated as these three men were when I entered the stable, there may be somebody at hand who will do to me what I have just done to these men, and will save me from a lingering and painful death."
When the fighting was entirely over, we surgeons had much work to do. I had not yet had any personal experience with the treatment of gunshot wounds, but I had read in Giovanni da Vigo's work that such injuries should be considered poisoned wounds, by reason of their contact with gunpowder, and that the correct way of treating such wounds was to cauterize them with oil of sambucus (elder flowers) that was actually boiling and to which a little theriaca had been added. At first I hesitated somewhat about carrying out this practice, but after watching the other surgeons, in order to learn exactly how they applied the boiling oil, I plucked up my courage and did exactly what they did. My supply of oil, however, soon gave out, and I then decided to use as a substitute a healing preparation composed of yolk of egg, oil of roses, and turpentine. I slept badly that night, as I greatly feared that, when I came to examine the wounded on the following morning, I should find that those whose wounds I had failed to treat with boiling oil had died from poisoning. I arose at a very early hour, and was much surprised to discover that the wounds to which I had applied the egg and turpentine mixture were doing well; they were quite free from swelling and from all evidence of inflammatory action; and the patients themselves, who showed no signs of feverishness, said that they had experienced little or no pain and had slept quite well.
