the.com/tourniquet
a deliberate trade — sacrifice the limb's blood to save the body's life
means a tight band twisted or cinched around a limb to compress the arteries and stop severe bleeding.
from From French tourniquet, from tourner, 'to turn' — because you tighten it by twisting, often with a stick wound round and round. The same turning root spins through 'tour,' 'tournament,' and 'turn' itself, all tracing back to Latin tornare, 'to turn on a lathe.'
- old debate
- Long feared to cost limbs; modern combat proved otherwise
- time limit
- Safe for roughly two hours before tissue suffers
- war revival
- Iraq and Afghanistan saved thousands, rewrote medical doctrine
- twist mechanism
- A windlass cranks pressure beyond bare hands' power
- pain warning
- Properly tight ones hurt enormously — that means working
battle of the somme — british surgeon peter bowman used tourniquets to save soldiers' limbs during the 1916 offensive, establishing military protocol
esmarch bandage — invented by german surgeon johann von esmarch in 1873, the first rubber tourniquet used in surgical practice
combat application tourniquet — us military issued cat tourniquet since 2005, credited with reducing combat amputations in iraq and afghanistan