Writers and Their Four-legged Sidekicks

A while back I asked my fellow WF members to tell me about their pets. I love animals and know many of you do, too.

Dale Jackson says:

"A good cowhorse is an indispensible tool and an absolute necessity for all phases of cow work. A good dog like the Border Collie is like having an extra cowboy with you and, as you can see, they are great dogs to be around. The German Shepherd is the homeguard and takes care of business keeping things secure at the ranch.

In terms of writing, I find that having an insight into animals is a valuable way to better understand human behavior as it translates into the characters in our books. These guys are more like partners than pets, and they have a way of becoming a part of everything we do.

My first two novels borrowed heavily on the relationship between men and horses and, in the second book, UNBROKE HORSES, the horse became a metaphor for the struggles of the young protagonist whose survival depended on his ability to recognize his own challenges in the actions of a small band of unbroke horses.

It’s impossible to minimize the importance of a good dog and a good horse."

Dale's novel UNBROKE HORSES won the 2013 Peacemaker Award for Best Western Novel.

This comes from Cheryl Pierson:

"Livia, I'm including a picture of our dog, Embry, with my daughter Jessica. This was taken a couple of years ago after Embry recovered from his stay at the Oklahoma State University veterinarians' teaching hospital. He had steroid responsive meningitis that almost killed him. Thank goodness this story had a very happy ending.

Embry is my "granddog" who lives with us now since Jessica has moved to a smaller place. He weighs in at 200 pounds and he's half Great Pyrenees and half Anatolian Shepherd. He's a herder by breed and the four people in our family are his "herd"--all others are intruders and will be bitten if they get too close. LOL

Embry still thinks of himself as a puppy and will sometimes try to sit in our laps. When I'm working, he comes in and will lie on the floor beside my chair. I have to turn my chair almost sideways so that he can raise his head from time to time and give me a hug. I've also learned to type pretty well with one hand for long spaces of time while I pet with the other. He does help me think better, and I've noticed that I add dogs to my stories more often since we've had him."

Cheryl's most recent publications are the short story "The Kindness of Strangers", which is available as an e-book, and the story "Outlaw's Kiss" in the anthology WISHING FOR A COWBOY. Her daughter Jessica is a talented artist who recently illustrated the children's book SARAH'S MUSIC.

Keith Souter tells us:

"I don't actually own a pet at the moment. I used to have a cat called Lily, who was my constant writing companion. If I was outside writing in the sun, then she would be basking in it close by. If I was at my writing desk, she would probably be curled up on a cushion in the bay window to the side of the desk. Sadly, she died a couple of years ago, but she is buried outside my study window, just six feet from where she used to sleep and keep me company. I was pretty upset when she died, so I wrote her into a crime novel, called FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. This is one of my Inspector McKinnon novels set on the Outer Hebridean island of West Uist. To make the story work, she ended up being transformed into a dog, but in my mind it is still Lily.

 

Now, I don't own a pet, but I regularly get to dog-sit my daughter's dog, Walt. He's a schoondle, a cross between a schnauzer and a poodle. We go jogging every morning when he stays with me. Well, really he walks and I run alongside him.  He is mischievous and he makes me laugh. When I have a plot problem to sort out we go for a walk and a play and generally the plot difficulty sorts itself out. I genuinely think that he helps me unravel things. He too is being worked into a story, this time a YA novel. This is in my Victorian adventure series about an orphan called Jack Moon. The second in the series is provisionally entitled THE GHOSTCATCHERS. Walt is a stray dog who happens to be psychic, so he allows Jack to communicate with his best friend, who died."

Keith is a regular contributor to WF's bestselling series WOLF CREEK and is also writing a series about the adventures of a dentist in the Old West, THE CASEBOOK OF DOCTOR MARCUS QUIGLEY.

Jim Griffin joins in with his answer:

"I have always had pets, ranging from goldfish to canaries and parakeets, to cats and dogs, to horses. Can’t imagine life without a pet or two.

Yes, I do draw inspiration from my pets. The horses in my Western stories are all based on horses I have owned. They reflect my own horses’ appearances, personalities, and peculiarities. In fact, if I hadn’t owned a horse, I never would have started writing. It was James Reasoner who encouraged me to write after he contacted me for answers to some questions which he had about horses. If that had never happened, I never would have attempted to write a Western novel.

Since I’ve been writing, my Shih Tzus, first Chauncey and now Dogie, have always stayed by my desk while I’m working on a book. Whenever it’s time to step back and take a break, I can always count on my dog being there to help me relax with a play session. That helps clear my mind and get back to the task at hand.

Finally, while they are hardly pets, there are two packs of coyotes which live in the town open space behind my place. Their nightly howling certainly sets the mood for writing Westerns."

Jim writes the original e-book series A RANGER NAMED ROWDY, is an important contributor to the WOLF CREEK series, and wrote the West of the Big River novel THE RANGER.

Charlie Whipple says:

"I brought home our first dog, Taro, for my oldest daughter's sixth birthday. My wife was not pleased at all, but we've never been without a dog since. The current resident is Tomlin, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who will turn 11 on February 21, 2014, the same birthdate (different year) as daughter No.2. 

You see, when wife Yukiko went to the shopping mall, she always wandered by the pet shop. Tomlin was a leftover. Time after time. Then she heard that leftovers were sometime euthanized. That did it. Next time she came home from the mall, she had Tomlin. He's gray haired and getting old, but we hope he'll stay around for a while longer.

While Tomlin is in the other room sleeping on our bed, I write. This year, besides the Wolf Creek series, I've had a novel entitled Monty McCord published from Black Horse Westerns, one called Diablo accepted, one called Road to Rimrock bought by Thorpe for large print. My Stryker's series of ebooks is under way. Stryker's Law, Stryker's Ambush, and soon, Stryker's Bounty. 

Also in ebooks, under Charles T. Whipple, you can find Nami of the Waves, a fantasy tale, fifth in a series, of 10th century Japan when all the mythical creatures were alive and well." 

Finally, Meg Mims tells us:

"I have two dogs, but I took in Benji in 2012 and wrote a novella about a rescue

dog in Santa Paws (totally new story, but the cover resembles him!)

This year I'm writing about a black cat rescue for Santa Claws - we had to put

our black cat down this summer. So she will be 'immortalized' in that 

novella, sort of."

James and I have four dogs of our own, including the two little ones who are usually in my lap while I'm working, forcing me to twist sideways to reach my computer. They may not be very good for my back, but they certainly work wonders for my heart.

 

A REVIEW OF WOLF CREEK: BOOK 1, BLOODY TRAIL BY CHARLIE STEEL

When I first heard that Western Fictioneers was going to write a series of books about a fictional western town in Kansas by multiple writers under one name, I thought, yeah—right, that’ll work. My cynicism was wrong. IT DOES WORK.

Under the fertile mind of Dr. Troy Smith, (current Western Fictioneers President and Professor of American Indian History at Tennessee Tech University) he single handedly developed the original concept of having multiple writers create a series of books under the fictional name of Ford Fargo. The imaginary town where interaction of the multiple characters would take place was Wolf Creek, Kansas. Spending a great deal of time and creative thinking, Dr. Troy Smith developed a “bible” of names, dates, and history of the town and its characters. With each character having a back story, the participating multiple writers of Western Fictioneers utilized this data and plot information to write individual chapters that could be combined into one cohesive book. The result, Voila! As to date: Nine Wolf Creek series books have been written and published by Western Fictioneers.

Not only is this a new concept in writing (for westerns), it’s one that has caught on with the readers---and the book series is reportedly selling well.

In reading the first book of the series, Wolf Creek: Book 1, Bloody Trail, I was blown away with the complex plot and multiple characters introduced in the first two chapters by writer Clay More (Dr. Keith Souter). There is a plethora of western characters introduced, such as you would find in any other town. Many of these individuals have been hardened by life, struck with grief, tragedy, and scarred by the Great Conflict. They have fled their secret pasts to start anew in Wolf Creek, a thriving community established on the stream by the same name. With the coming of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, shortly after the Civil War, Wolf Creek became a growing cow town.

Chapter Two is one of the most exciting and dramatic episodes I have ever read in any book. Wolf Creek is suddenly raided by over twenty ex-soldiers, all experienced killers, former members of Quantrill Raiders. They ride into town, guns blazing, and in the process of thieving and robbing the bank, they execute a well planned military type raid by shooting down men, women, children, and horses and setting fire to various buildings. How the town endures and barely survives this unwarranted attack of over twenty killers, is an unforgettable and complex scene no reader will want to miss.

Chapters Three and Four are written by James J. Griffin. An experienced horseman himself, Griffin describes in detail how a posse is formed and rides out and begins to chase down the town killers, thieves, and bank robbers. Griffin’s expertise and horse knowledge show the importance of proper rest and treatment of the equines along the trail, or else their chase would end before it began. The interaction between the members of the posse describes men with tragic and hardened pasts, which as westerners, ends up serving them well in their long bloody chase after the outlaws.

The book then, in the following consecutive chapters, as the title indicates becomes a bloody tale of pursuit and justice.

However, this is no ordinary story of outlaw versus good guy. Intertwined in the following chapters written by Troy D. Smith, James Reasoner, L. J. Martin, and Cheryl Pierson, is a well developed interplay of specific characters who reveal their hidden pasts along the outlaw’s trail.

Quickly we learn that there are no innocents, even among the posse. We follow their rugged pursuit as they face ambush. Some in the posse are killed, others are wounded, all face hunger, thirst, and deprivation in their pursuit of the killers. Conflict arises between former union and confederate soldiers. The character interaction increases in intensity as the posse moves forward. It is only the ambushes and dangers they face from traps left by the outlaws that manage to keep them focused and together.

With each chapter we continually learn more about many of the posse members. Of most interest, were four distinct characters. The first is Dr. Logan Munro, a man of the world. He served as a physician and British soldier in the Crimean War and was later stationed in India, where he encountered the Indian Mutiny of 1857. During that time, his beloved wife became ill and died. Grieved that he could not save her, Dr. Munro ended up traveling to America and serving as a doctor in the Great Conflict. Having served in so many wars, and operated on countless wounded young soldiers, Munro is tired of death. He wants only to settle down in Wolf Creek and treat the town’s patients and live out the remainder of his life peacefully. With the raid on Wolf Creek and with so many of his acquaintances killed, he again picks up his Beaumont-Adams revolver and joins the posse to serve as doctor and experienced soldier.

Charley Blackfeather, half black/half Seminole has been hardened by the circumstances of his birth. At an early age he fought American soldiers who had come to Florida to forcibly remove and combat his tribe. In the swamps of Florida he learned stealth and the abilities to silently use knife and tomahawk. Having seen his family, friends, and fellow half black Indians stolen and sold into slavery, murdered, or forcibly assimilated and sent west, and to escape slavery himself, he joined an Indian Union regiment and fought in the Civil War. During the conflict he fought members of Quantrill’s Raiders who murdered many of his best friends. For Charley Blackfeather, this raid is not just to seek vengeance for the attack on Wolf Creek. It was to seek justice and find and kill those who murdered his friends. Above all those in the posse, Blackfeather is the most skilled in the art of weapons and death.

The third most interesting character for me, is Spike Sweeney. He is Wolf Creek’s blacksmith, and an ex-confederate soldier. Scarred by the war, he plans to live out his life tending to his trade and minding his own business. When the raid on Wolf Creek occurs, he sees he must act. Using his former military skills, he is a great asset to the posse, although somewhat distrusted. This trail of justice and revenge has hidden rewards for Sweeney as he learns to heal, through coming to the realization that many soldiers he fought against were human beings much like himself.

Last, Bill Torrance, the livery owner, watches as his best friend was shot down and killed, as was the woman he had great affection for. Putting on guns he swore he would never use, he joins the posse. On the trail a secret of his past was revealed, making him uniquely suited for this lawful pursuit.

This review does not in any way begin to do justice to this first book of the Wolf Creek series. The reader will have to take my word that regardless of genre interest, everyone will find this a well-written and exciting book. I predict a great future for the Wolf Creek series and easily see a Hollywood movie, or a long playing television program come from this exciting creation.

So, without reservation, I say: Wake up America! Pay attention Hollywood! This is an extraordinary Western epic of Americana and a great story any reader of any genre would want to buy and enthusiastically consume.

Review by Charlie Steel, author of Desert Heat, Desert Cold and Other Tales of the West.

THE DOCTOR'S BAG

PULL THAT TOOTH, DOC!

Keith Souter aka Clay More

If you had a look at the post DIG IT OUT, DOC! in which we looked at arrow wounds, you may have been expecting Part 2 this month, about bullet wounds. But I thought we'd save that for later and this time cross boundaries and look at dentistry, because your average frontier doctor would very likely have to deal with his fair share of oral and dental problems. In the absence of a qualified dentist  the doctor may have been a preferable option than the blacksmith, or anyone else who could wield a pair of pliers or tongs.

I am actually working on a series of short stories at the moment for High Noon Press, about Doctor Marcus Quigley, a qualified dentist, gambler and occasional bounty hunter, so dentistry is very much on my mind at the present. Each story is from Doc Quigley's casebook, but they are all linked, like the matinee serials of yesteryear  to tell a larger complete story. The first is called DEAD IN THE SADDLE and the second, GUILTY AS SINNED is due out today!

Dentistry in ancient days
Teeth have always been of prime concern to people. The pain of toothache, the agony of gumboils, the smell of halitosis, and the unpleasant appearance of black, yellow or dirty teeth have caused people to seek the ministrations of all manner of practitioner over the centuries.

The ancients believed that dental caries was the result of a toothworm that got inside the tooth and ate it away. The Babylonians attempted to smoke these irritating creatures out by a quite ingenious method. As long ago as 2250 BC they mixed henbane with beeswax and then heated it in order to produce smoke. This smoke was directed into the carious hole, after which the hole was filled with a sort of gum mastic and more henbane.

The Egyptians had specialist physicians who would deal with teeth and gum problems. They seemed to do little in the way of removal, their treatments mainly consisting of magic rituals, charms and sacrifices to appease the gods, then the use of various purgative, enemas and masticatory agents which when chewed would encourage the production of saliva.

The Etruscans in the first millennium BC seem to have been the first people to use false teeth. They even made bridges so that false teeth could be anchored to normal teeth by rings of gold. Archaeologists are unsure, however, whether these were designed for the use of the living, or whether they were made to enhance the look of the body after death.

The Greeks actually recognised that sometimes teeth need to be pulled in order to allow an abscess to be released. The great Hippocrates even invented some crude forceps for the purpose.

The Romans built on the work of the Greeks and developed a series of instruments specifically for work on the teeth. They also worked gold into crowns for the teeth and different types of forceps for tooth pulling. Mostly dental care was restricted to the nobility and caries, gum disease and ultimately toothlessness were the norms for the bulk of the population.

As for mouthwashes, one of the most widely advocated in Roman times was urine, especially the freshly passed urine of young boys.

The middle ages

Although universities were starting to spring up across Europe, at Padua, Salerno, Bologna, Montpellier and Paris, and in Britain at Oxford and Cambridge, yet knowledge about teeth and their care did not really advance from the days of the Romans. Medical texts were reprinted, but the treatments and recommendations were still a mix of magic and multi-ingredient medication, coupled with purgation and emesis.

St Apollonia of Alexandria was the patron saint of toothaches. She had been a deaconess who was martyred by the Romans in 249 AD, after riots inspired by her teachings. When she refused to renounce her religion she had her teeth pulled one by one and her jaw broken. She then threw herself into a fire after saying in her prayer that she hoped no-one would experience her pain and suffering or the agony of toothache. Such was the power of the Church and the belief in the saint that many would probably receive relief from toothache by praying to her. Whether that relief was the result of saintly intervention or the power of the placebo effect is another question.

For the common people recourse was often made to remedies from the old leech books (from the Anglo-Saxon leche, meaning ‘leach’, the sign of a doctor). These would advise that caries could be cleared of our old friend the toothworm by the smoke of henbane, or after being packed with mixtures containing substances like ground beetles and lizards or raven dung.

And of course tooth-pulling would be the most effective way of dealing with agonising toothache. Putting up with the pain of the extraction would for many be preferable to the agony of the underlying abscess or nerve pain. Physicians did not generally like to get their hands dirty, so tooth-pulling was done by barber-surgeons or itinerant tooth-pullers. 

These itinerant tooth-pullers or mountebanks could make a decent living by going from town to town and market to market, setting up their stall with a flag or poster of St Apollonia, a string of wooden teeth or a carved crocodile with sharp teeth. They would climb on their crude box or stage and bring in crowds with their claims of being able to pull teeth without pain, or with such speed that there would be minimal pain. Any teeth that proved difficult to extract would be left alone with the advice that they must not be removed, since the pain they had experienced was because they were ‘eye-teeth.’ This was of course another of the myths that was promulgated, that they were in some way connected to the eyes and that blindness could result if they were pulled.

The favoured instrument was called the Pelican, a large instrument like pliers, which would inspire fear in the mind of the sufferer as a tooth-puller advanced with it poised.

The tooth-pullers also offered their quack remedies or mouth washes that were guaranteed to whiten black teeth and turn them into ivory. Doubtless they had many tricks and ploys up their sleeves or in the mouths of the paid confederates in the audience. By all accounts these mountebanks were great crowd drawers with their teeth-pulling, for such is the darker side of human nature that people often revel in watching the misfortune of others.

The age of enlightenment

A more scientific basis for Medicine and Surgery started to develop in the eighteenth century, but still there were some colorful quacks.  One such person was  the mountebank Martin van Butchall, who rode about London in the 1770s on a large white horse painted with purple spots. He carried a bone before him and declared that he could draw teeth painlessly and also manufacture a set of false teeth and fit them absolutely painlessly.

A natural showman he went beyond the bounds of taste and introduced a macabre reason why clients should go to see him, which they did in droves. When his first wife died he had her embalmed; had glass eyes fitted to the corpse, which he  kept in a glass case in his hall. There he introduced her to all of his guests.

His second wife was not so enamoured by the presence of his first wife in the family home, so reluctantly, van Butchell donated the body to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it was kept until it was destroyed along with many other exhibits when the building was bombed during the Second World War.

Pierre Fauchard (1678-1761) is regarded as the father of modern dentistry. His landmark book Le Chirurgien Dentiste (the Surgeon Dentist) was first published in 1728 and set the standard for the emerging discipline as a specific specialty of surgery. Drawing on his early experience as a ship’s surgeon he wrote about surgical procedures to treat diseased gums and teeth and all manner of injuries to the mouth and jaws. He used silk, linen and metal suture material and taught how to make dentures, bridges and crowns.

He also advocated the use of the toothbrush. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that people began to use them with any regularity.

Fauchard’s work found its way across the channel and in the 1750s the word ‘dentist’ was adopted into English. An apprenticeship type of profession arose, it taking four or five years to become experienced enough to set up a sign or a brass plate and establish a practice of one’s own.

Waterloo teeth
The craft of dentistry began to develop. Interestingly, as trade increased so too did the importation of sugar from abroad. Many people developed a sweet tooth, which ultimately was followed by rotting teeth. Cause and effect was not apparent and although surgical dentistry was improving, yet many dentists still believed in the mythical toothworm. Their main function was to pull teeth and prepare false ones.

The best false teeth that could be obtained, however, were human ones. Although dentists had experimented with porcelain, ivory and bone, none of these materials was ever as good as the enamel-covered human tooth. This created a huge problem, of course, since they were hard to come by and the law of supply and demand forced the price of dentures ever upward. Some dentists advertised to buy teeth from people willing to sell theirs for a guinea or two a tooth, the highest price going for the incisors.

George Washington, the first President of the USA was reputed to have a wooden set of dentures. In fact this is a myth, since he had a very fine set of dentures consisting of a smoothed plate of hippopotamus ivory into which human, horse and pig teeth were inserted.

 

                                       George Washington's teeth

Pull that tooth, Doc

The Pelican was the first purpose-made instrument for pulling teeth. early examples date from the 14th Century.

This was succeeded by the tooth key, which saw use throughout the 17th and 18th century, right up to the mid-18th, when it was still being used. Doc Marcus Quigley still occasionally uses one when the situation is right.

Fill that cavity Many dental practitioners did attempt to fill cavities. Indeed Fauchard advocated using tin or gold foil, although he found that tin was more effective. It was not until the 1830s that dentists started to prepare the cavity by removing the caries first. Accordingly they started using a bur and thimble to remove as much carious tissue as possible.

One of the greatest aids was the dental mirror, which allowed dentists to see behind teeth. The image is reversed, of course, so you ave to learn how to use them.

A drill based on the Archimedean screw; essentially a hand-drill was introduced from the 1840s, but it had to be used with both hands and it was limited in accessibility. It was not until 1871 that an American dentist, James Beall Morrison (1829-1919) invented the foot treadle drill that this problem was overcome. It was one of the most important dental inventions ever.

The dental chair had been another advance that almost became a dental icon. Custom-made wooden ones were introduced in 1850 with special curves to allow the patient to get into the best position for the operator. Once again, Dr Morrison was at the forefront of this development and the Morrison chair became popular throughout the USA.

In the early part of the nineteenth century dentists started experimenting with amalgams as filling agents. Generally, however, gold was preferred and although silver-mercury amalgams called succedaneum, meaning ‘artificial substitute’ were introduced, it did not become used generally until towards the close of the century. Indeed, in America its use was banned and a dentist could be struck off their register for using it.

Pain was always a problem and early dentists made their name, as did surgeons, by virtue of their speed. Complex procedures were not feasible, unless the patient was drunk.Then in 1846 in America Dr William T G Morton (1819-1868) introduced ether to permit painless extractions and the field of anaesthesia was born.

Doc Holliday
John Henry Holliday (1851-1887) must be the most famous dentist of the old west. He graduated DDS from the Philadelphia College of Dental Surgery in 1872, after a single year of study. It was not long after he started practice that he developed tuberculosis and moved west for his health. At that time the pathology of the condition was unknown, although its severity was understood. 

Although he practised as a dentist when on his travels, he primarily made his living as a professional gambler. And of course, he soon acquired a reputation as a gunman of prowess. His name is forever linked in history with that of Wyatt Earp and the town of Tombstone, Arizona.


________________________________________________________________________________

This month the lucky writer of a comment will win a copy of MEDICAL MEDDLERS, MEDIUMS AND MAGICIANS - the Victorian Age of Credulity by Dr Keith Souter. The names will be randomised and the winner 's name will be drawn. Keith will then just need a postal address to send a hardback copy of the book (and it will take a few days, since it will be coming from England)

THE DOCTOR'S BAG

 DIG IT OUT, DOC!

Part 1    ARROWS

Keith Souter aka Clay More

Out on the frontier a doctor would have to be prepared to deliver babies, splint and fix broken bones, and dig out arrows and bullets. Tough work, if you then had to go and play poker and drink a little whiskey.

            In many a western a doctor is either called upon to dig out a bullet or arrow. He usually does so with some ease, depositing the missile in a tin bowl with a resounding clunk, a wipe of his brow and the message that “he’ll be all right now, once I patch up the wound.”

            But of course, in real life things are not quite as simple, so in this post I’m going to look at digging out arrows. In a later post we’ll talk about digging out bullets.

An ancient weapon

 I often mention that I live within arrowshot of the ruins of a medieval castle.  The castle is a Norman motte-and-bailey, one of many built all over England after the Norman Conquest by William the Conqueror in 1066. It is called Sandal Castle and although it is very much a ruin now, it was once of of the two most important castles in the north of England. Along with Sheriff Hutton near York, it was the base for the Council of the North, effectively the government for the North of England as established by King Richard III.  You may know him from William Shakespeare’s portrayal of him as the villainous uncle who had his two nephews murdered in the Tower of London. King Richard had started a rebuilding schedule a couple of years before his death.

            

The farmland around the castle was the site of the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, when King Richard’s father, The Duke of York was killed and beheaded. It was a brutal battle fought with longbow, pikes, swords and battle-axes.

            

I am a member of the Friends of Sandal Castle, a group who try to maintain the castle’s image and its place in history. Among other things, I have an interest in the longbow, since it played such a part in English history. And of course, the bow and arrow is one of the most ancient weapons. Indeed,  the invention of a weapon that fires projectiles a good distance enabled man to make hunting safer and more effective in the days of our earliest ancestors. Inevitably, as a swift weapon against other men it had no equal for many millennia. In a paper written in 2001 in World Journal of Surgery, Karger estimates that in the history of warfare, arrows have killed more people than any other weapon, including firearms.

The ruins of the Great Hall at Sandal Castle. The moat is beyond the far wall and archers would have defended the battlemented walls. 

Surgery advances in  times of war

It is an old maxim that surgeons adapt their techniques to the injuries of their times. The more trauma that is seen, the worse the injuries, then surgeons develop operations and methods  to deal with them.

            

There is a misconception that surgeons were an ill-trained lot of butchers in days gone by. In fact, in medieval times surgeons were often highly skilled and ingenious people. Having good surgeons in your army or navy was reckoned to be utterly essential, for people suffered horrific injures and needed to be treated. Arrow wounds were a major cause of death and morbidity.

            

At the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 Prince Henry , who would later become King Henry V (all this is recounted in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts I and 2) was wounded in the face by an arrow.  It apparently entered at the side of his nose, and according to the prince’s own surgeon, John Bradmore, it went in to a depth of almost six inches. Impossible, you might say. And again, how could he survive? Well, it is possible. This could well have been a penetrating injury that went in below the brain. He was undoubtedly lucky to survive, yet the skill of his surgeon is incredible.

            

John Badmore treated the wound with honey, crafted a surgical instrument to screw into the wooden shaft so that he could extract it.  Then he washed t out with alcohol. The patient was left with his battle scar, but also with great credibility as a warrior. He went on to become the hero of the Battle of Agincourt. A large part of his success at the battle was his deployment of English longbowmen.

A contemporary drawing of Bradmore's arrow extractor, from the book Fair Book of Surgery, c 1450

Ambroise Paré (1510-1590)

At the Battle of  Milan in 1536 a young barber-surgeon came across two badly wounded soldiers. A comrade asked f there was anything that he could do for them. Upon answering that he could not, the soldier slit their throats to put them out of their misery. Ambrose Pare was the surgeon. He was horrified and he vowed that in the future he would do all that he could to help even the most badly injured person. He famously said:

The art of medicine is to cure sometimes, relieve often and comfort always.

Ambroise Paré operating

Ambroise Paré was true to his words. He became one of  most influential anatomists and is regarded as one of the fathers of modern surgery. He devised means of treating wounds, invented prosthetic limbs and he introduced the technique of ligating arteries, rather than cauterizing them. Significantly, he established battlefield surgical techniques that greatly improved the chances of a casualty's survival. 

                                      Various prostheses invented by Ambroise Paré. 

Arrow wounds were, of course, common and  Paré  developed a pair of forceps for removing detached arrowheads. The uppermost of the two drawings below shows the forceps and the lowermost shows them being inserted into the arrowhead to remove it. 

Of course, there were many different types of arrowheads,several of which barbed. Removing them would cause further damage, if they were simply drawn out. That demanded greater ingenuity on the part of the surgeons, who developed dilators and other instruments in order to protect the tissues as well as they could and allowed them to retrieve the arrowheads. 

Dig it out, Doc!

One of the best sources of information about arrow wounds in the modern era comes from a paper by Dr J H Bill, an MD and Assistant Surgeon, published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, published in 1862. He wrote this paper from his own experience as a surgeon on the frontier. 

                  

He begins by describing how arrows are made, which is really crucial to the understanding of the problems involved with arrow wounds. Basically, the arrow has a shaft and a head. The shaft would vary in size from two to three feet, generally being made from dogwood. The head would be inserted into a slit and lashed to the shaft. The head would be made of iron, varying in size from half an inch to two and a half inches n length, and about half an inch to three-quarters of an inch in width at the base.

The lashing was done with tendons, which were tied tightly and allowed  to dry to tighten them further. This is also of importance to our understanding, because once an arrow penetrates the body the tissue fluids and blood would cause the lashing tendon to swell and come loose. Any attempt to pull the arrow out, as people were wont to do, would simply cause the shaft to come out, leaving the potentially lethal arrow-head inside the body. 

Dr Bill describes the relative frequency of arrow wounds. Wounds to the upper limbs were the commonest, because you could see an arrow coming and attempt to fend it off, only to sustain a wound, probably hitting and lodging in bone. Then came abdominal wounds, then chest, then lower limbs, then head, and lastly neck. Multiple arrow wounds were common, since a bowman could fire off six arrows per minute and once a person was hit once, they would be easy targets for the second and third.

The following are his recommendations for wounds to non-vital parts of the body.

1. An arrow passing through a limb makes a clean half-punctured, half-incised wound, which will generally heal by first intention, if proper treatment be instituted (That means the wound heals well as the two sides of the wound contact one another. This is as opposed to healing by second intention, as when a cavity heals from the bottom outwards. the second takes longer.)

2. An arrow lodging in bone requires some force, much tact, strong forceps, and an ample incision for its removal. (That means the wound needs to be made larger)

3. This removal should always be effected as soon as possible after the receipt of the injury, and the greatest care taken in doing so not to detach the shaft from the head of the arrow.

4. Always use the finger to explore the lodgement of an arrow-head and to determine if it is bent or straight.

5. If we fail to detect or to extract an arrow-head lodged in bone, we wait a few days, trusting to suppuration, tents, position, etc, and then search again and again for it.

6. If we fail in removing the foreign body by these means, we operate, making large incisions and compressing the artery of the limb. 

He also advocated using a magnet to attempt to detect the arrow-head. 

To remove arrows lodged in the chest or the abdomen he stated that it was vital to get the arrow-head out, otherwise it would be fatal. To do so he advised using a Coghill's suture twister, a long probe, basically, which could be used to pass along the length of the arrow shaft, bearing with it a loop of wire suture. This would be done after making a large incision to permit space and subsequently ease the extraction.  The  loop would be passed over the tip of the arrow-head and then drawn tight. It would then be twisted around the shaft, thereby ensuring that traction on the shaft would not cause the head to separate. And out it would come!

Then, clunk! Into the bowl.