Trueta method for treating war wounds
Método Trueta de tratamiento de heridas de guerra
- Date
- 1936-1939 · confidence high
- Place
- Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
- Credited to
- Josep Trueta
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A method of treating open wounds and war fractures: radical surgical cleaning, no primary suture, and closed dressing with plaster immobilisation. Josep Trueta applied it in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and sharply reduced gangrene and amputations.
The closed plaster method had been used earlier by Winnett Orr in Nebraska (1920s); Trueta systematised it with prior debridement and applied it on a large scale. The figures for reduced mortality come from his own series and have not been independently verified.
What it led to
- adoption by the British army in the Second World War
- protocols of debridement and closed dressing for trauma
- his book The Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures (1939)