handled as if there were no fracture at all, to the infinite comfort of
the patient, but the wounds themselves cleared up with great rapidity.
We were told that the plates would break loose, that the screws would
come out, that the patient would come to a bad end through the
violent sepsis induced by the presence of a "foreign body" in the
shape of the steel plate. But none of these disasters happened, the
cases did extremely well, and one of our most indignant critics
returned to his own hospital after seeing them with his pockets full of
plates. The only difficulty with some of them was to induce them to
stop in bed, and it is a fact that on the night of our bombardment I met
one of them walking downstairs, leaning on a dresser's arm, ten days
after the operation.

And this brings me to a subject on which I feel very strongly, the folly
of removing bullets. If a bullet is doing any harm, pressing on some
nerve, interfering with a joint, or in any way causing pain or
inconvenience, by all means let it be removed, though even then it
should in most cases never be touched until the wound is completely
healed. But the mere presence of a bullet inside the body will of itself
do no harm at all. The old idea that it will cause infection died long
ago. It may have brought infection with it; but the removal of the bullet
will not remove the infection, but rather in most cases make it fire up.
We now know that, provided they are clean, we can introduce steel
plates, silver wires, silver nets, into the body without causing any
trouble at all, and a bullet is no worse than any of these. It is a matter
in which the public are very largely to blame, for they consider that
unless the bullet has been removed the surgeon has not done his job.
Unless he has some specific reason for it, I know that the surgeon
who removes a bullet does not know his work. It may be the mark of a
Scotch ancestry, but if I ever get a bullet in my own anatomy, I shall