Backwoods Surgery & Medicine by Charles Stuart Moody

Several years ago I stood beside a cot in a hunter’s cabin in the heart of the Bitter Root Mountains in Idaho, after a three days’ ride, and watched a valuable young life go out as the result of an unattended compound fracture of the thigh. At another time I amputated a leg to prevent the spread of gangrene from a simple cut across the instep while the camper was splitting wood, an accident which, properly treated, would have resulted at most only in a slight inconvenience. Once again, I transformed my boat into a funeral barge and conveyed a young man who had only been in10 the water three minutes back to his sorrowing parents dead, because his companions were ignorant of how to resuscitate him.