Not such distant mirrors

Editor—An excerpt from One hundred years ago describes the flushing of the peritoneum introduced by Lawson Tait as being “greatly to the patient's advantage.”¹

In the closing years of the first world war my mother was ward and theatre sister to the celebrated gynaecologist Russell Howard at the London Hospital. She used to tell me how he would empty a bucketful of warm tap water into the abdomen at the end of an operation before sewing up, pelvic peritonitis being then prevalent in Whitechapel.

I found this an excellent way of cleaning up nasty compound fractures before routine debridement.