Medical bags

[tc556guy]

Originally Posted by countryboy73

For instance, people survived amputation by drunken field surgeons with no clue of sterile technique during the War of Northern Aggression and others. We can do considerably better than that, even at home, these days.

Hmm..some did survive;a LOT did not and died on the table or shortly thereafter. A whole lot. And the butchery..literally...resulted in surgeries where whole limbs would be hacked off when more subtle measures would be used today. The survivors kept the after-market prosthetic companies busy into the 20th century.
I would hope that as a society our medical practices have come a long way since then.

[countryboy73]

The point I was making was that people did survive under those horrible circumstances, and that more would survive today, due to better practices. Survivors of horrible technique and filthy environments kept those prosthetic makers busy. Took a fair number of survivors to do that, I might add. We can definitely do better today, even at home. Just the general knowledge of sterile technique and wound management gives us a huge leg up. I have a surgical tech in the family who is working toward a nurse practitioner career, so we can do considerably better. We even have a psychologist in the family to help with the counseling for an amputee...

[TheKezarWoodsman]

Actually based on some googling, during the civil war an amputation to only one extremity (within 24 hours), tended to have a survival rate of roughly 70%, wereas if there were two or more being operated (or longer than a day since injury) on it dropped to around 50%

These doctors had very little training, and most learned on the job. Due to that i would say those are pretty good numbers, espeicially due to lack of even WW1 era technology (we couldnt even measure blood pressure accuratly untill the 1890s).

The very high deathrates were jacked up by rhe doctors leaving aside those wounded in the torso untill later, as they knew very little about how to fix it, and they wanted to save the most possible so they went to the amputees. By the time they got to old general kidneysplatter, it was usually too late and already infected due to sitting out with very little attention.