burns – Medical Memoirs

An expression of our daily life in Ethiopia.

For those of you who work exclusively in a hospital with everything, our hospital only had one X-ray box which was in the X-ray department – a long way from the ward. So our x-rays were viewed holding them up to a window. Bu if you look carefully you can see the cervical spine and a huge intrathoracic extension of a goitre.

And here you can see the specimen still in the neck but having been brought out of the superior mediastinum. In the late 90’s I wrote a paper on 300 thyroidectomies. The average weight was 500Gm. There were a lot more after that!

And a couple more above to let you judge the sizes!

The three pictures above are a series from a man who had been critically ill at home and left lying on his side. He recovered but was with a huge bedsore. Eventually he went home well. Often we had to take our grafts with a razor blade.

The next three are to show several more quite large areas. The last is an electrical burn. As you can see his arm has been amputated as was his leg. I am going through my slides and still have a long way to go but I have already over 100 slides of burns.

Barry Hicks

Burns

After I had recovered from the illness which brought me home from my first stint in Ethiopia, I became the on staff surgeon of a large (602 bed) Queensland country hospital. The previous surgeon had become the full time Medical Director. As I took over he requested that I allow him to manage the patients admitted with burns. I was only too happy to agree. I can hardly remember a single time in my stints in Ethiopia when we didn’t have at least one burns patient and usually more in the wards.

Burns are common in Ethiopia for the following reasons.

There are open unguarded fires in the middle of many huts.
Mothers often have to walk considerable distances to get wood or water. They go when the baby or infant is asleep and the children either roll or fall into the fire.
Most epilepsy is untreated and in an attack they may fall into a fire.
Mud houses, built around old timber, burn in a flash if they catch alight.
Electricity is frequently poorly installed.

BELOW THE LINE ARE PHOTOS OF BURNS – SOME ARE GRAPHIC