Burned Alive

Somewhere on the seven seas a 19-year-old Navy fireman was inside a minesweeper's boiler, chipping off scale, when somebody turned on the steam. Three times the boy plunged at the "curtain of steam and boiling water," across the only exit, twice collided with an electric fan before he got out. When he reached a hospital ship an hour and a half later, he was probably the most severely burned man on medical record. Boston's Cocoanut Grove fire had scorched 55% of Coast Guardsman Clifford Johnson's body, and his survival was considered a medical miracle. The young fireman was burned on 75 to 80% of his body, and lived.

Say Captain Maximillian Christian Kern and the other Navy doctors who report the case in the Naval Medical Bulletin: "Burn patients die not of their burns, but of shock, toxemia or sepsis." The burned sailor suffered all three, one after the other. Blood and plasma transfusions, salt solution by vein, sedatives and a sound pair of kidneys pulled him through.

Captain Kern and his helpers, who have handled 360 burn cases aboard a hospital ship, do not believe in tannic acid for burns--it forms a loose, crusty scab under which infection often develops. All they used on the young fireman was sulfathiazole ointment and rather tight bandages. The tightness slowed the oozing of blood serum into injured tissues, thus reducing shock. A month after he was burned, the sailor's wounds were healthy and pinch grafts were laid on his deepest burns. The patient, almost unscarred, is now back on duty.

In the same Bulletin Commander Melvin Dewey Abbott and Lieut. John Randolph Gepfert report using medicated human blood plasma as a burn dressing. They got the idea from the light yellow blood serum which exudes from any deep burn and acts as a soothing, protective coating. They mixed blood plasma with a little sulfanilamide and some gum tragacanth to make a paste, used it on twelve second-degree burns. "The results were very definitely better than those obtained by the use of any one of the many methods in vogue during the past two years."

These results bear out experiments in various U.S. laboratories which show that good wound dressings can be made from blood constituents.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.