Suggestions for a ready method of recording surgical cases in hospital practice / by Edward Lund.

  • Lund, Edward, 1823-1898.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions for a ready method of recording surgical cases in hospital practice / by Edward Lund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    -will afterwards explain. By this method of having the case-papers belonging to the difierent patients placed in a certain order upon the file the papers can be turned over as we go through the list, and the risk of overlooking any case is greatly diminished, for it is very annoying in hospital practice to find, after we have left a ward and thought we had seen all our patients in it, that there are still one or two whom we had omitted, simply because our attention was not directed to them and the patients had been re- moved from their usual position in the ward or taken into some other part of the hospital. As soon, then, as the report of a case has come to an end, a note is made on the upper part of the paper, showing how the case has terminated, by striking out from the marks representing accident patient,^^ out-patient,^^ home-patienV' ‘^cured,” died,^^ and “ P. M. X.,” all the terms except the one corresponding to the event which has occurred. Thus, if a case has unfortunately come to a fatal termination, and a post- mortem examination has been made upon it, all the marks would be struck out except “ died and “ P. M. X.,^^ and the paper would then be taken off the file and put away. It wdll be observed, however, by looking at fig. 2, that I have been at considerable pains to abbreviate as far as possible the peculiar terms which I make use of in recording cases; in fact, I have continued for this purpose a sort of long shorthand,^'’ as it has been styled. My attention was first directed to the possibility of adopting this method of diminishing the labour of note-taking by several very interesting conversations I had with the late Mr. John Harland, of this city, well known for his great skill as a phono- graphic writer, and the very scientific manner in which he had investigated the whole subject of stenography from its earliest times. In the following letter, which I am glad to be able to embody in this paper, it will be seen that he has gone fully into a consideration of the possibility of so far shortening the words we use in writing, together with the employment of a few simple specific signs, that we can quickly construct a long shorthand, which can easily be written, and as easily deciphered, even by those unaccustomed to such manuscripts.