RECOVERY FROM A BROKEN NECK.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 996, 12 February 1883, Page 4

RECOVERY FROM A BROKEN NECK.

John Collery, a San Francisco teamster, about five months ago, tried to drive his team through a barn-door, and in so doing had his head forced down on his breast until his neck was broken. Police-surgeon Stambangh found that the seventh cervical vertebra was fractured, and that the spinal cord had been stretched nearly two inches. As the fatality in'such cases is estimated at nine hundred and ninety-nine in one thousand, everybody gave up the hope of his recovery. Recently, however, a reporter met Collery who stated that he was almost as well as before the accident, except for a slight stiffness on his right side. After his removal to his home he was laid flat on his back, with a sort of fence about his head and neck which kept him immovable for over two months. Both the body of the vertebra and the arching laminae were discovered to be broken, and the operation of. joining them together without pinching the spinal cord where it had sagged between the ragged edges is described as one of the most difficult ever performed. For a month the patient lay on his back, completely paralysed in one half of his body, and with but little feeling in the other. If he moved in the slightest' degree during the first fortnight, ho could plainly feel the jagged edges of the bone grate together, and for hours after such an attempt he was content to lie on his hard bed without attempting to move a muscle, for fear that the spinal cord should be crushed, and his existence ended in a twinkling. The straight position attainable was required, and Dr Stambangh was compelled to refuse the patient a . mattress, forcing him to lie on a wide plank. Collery says that before his eight weeks of enforced quietness was ended he thought that board was made of adamant, from its hardness. The most dangerous time he experienced, he says, was one day when an attendant told him that a man whose neck could stand breaking as his had was not born to be hanged. His desire to laugh was irresistible, and the shaking-up his merriment gave him caused his fasten-, ings to burst, and the fracture came' near being, ruptured afresh. The paralysis has now almost entirely disappeared, and Dr Stambangh says that Collery will be able to go to work within six months.—Frank Leslie’s “ Illustrated.”