When the skin—or, in the case of injuries of the base of the skull or the sinuses, the mucous membrane—is broken, a wound is exposed to additional hazards, since the tissues may be invaded by foreign material such as bacteria, dirt, and fragments of clothing, which may give rise to serious local or general complications from infection. Furthermore, if the break in the skin is large, the resulting exposure of the wounded tissues to the drying and cooling effects of the air may increase the damage caused by the wounding agent itself.
A needle or a sharp knife that passes through the tissues with ease, dividing them cleanly or separating them, will produce relatively little damage except to those tissues directly in its course, and, indeed, unless an important structure is injured, the wounds caused are seldom serious. On the other hand, a bomb fragment, irregular and jagged, will, as it churns and rips through the soft tissues, produce extensive damage for a considerable distance in all directions. Likewise, the injury caused by crushing is frequently serious.
Skin, being sturdy and elastic and well supplied with blood, tolerates injury well and recovers quickly. The subcutaneous fatty tissues are more delicate and more easily deprived of their blood supply. Muscle, likewise, is sensitive to the damaging effect of shrapnel, being readily torn and unable to survive diminished blood supply for any appreciable time. Muscle, when damaged, is particularly prone to infection.
An injury to bone in an open wound is always serious, for any broken fragment detached from its blood supply will not survive if infection occurs, and it will remain as a foreign body in the wound to cause further complications. Even if the bone is cleanly broken and there are no loose fragments, infection may enter the raw surfaces of the fracture with disastrous results.
Clearly the seriousness of a wound is greatly increased if there is injury to a joint, a nerve, a major blood vessel, or an internal organ.
Contamination of a wound may occur at the moment of wounding or at any time thereafter until healing is complete. The effects of various nonbacterial contaminants vary considerably. In general, the critical factor for nonbacterial contaminants is the extent of the contamination. In the case of bacterial contaminants, the type of contaminant is of greater importance. Infection caused by virulent bacteria nourished by dead tissue and organic foreign material in the wound may take several forms, of which the three most important are: gas gangrene, the most dreaded, arising almost exclusively in damaged muscle tissue and spreading with alarming rapidity to cause death if unchecked by surgical or medical treatment; infections caused by organisms such as Streptococcus and Staphylococcus and the coliform bacteria, in which the local production of pus is a prominent feature accompanying a general reaction that may be severe; and tetanus, an often fatal infection that becomes evident some days after the wound has occurred, frequently without any marked local manifestations but characterized by generalized muscle spasms.
The final healing of a wound is the result of a series of complex biological events taking place over a long period. Viewed in the simplest way, in an untreated but uncomplicated wound, as from a clean knife cut, the process is as follows: When tissues are cut, the edges of the wound separate, apparently pulled apart by the elasticity of the skin. Blood from the severed blood vessel fills the cavity of the wound and overflows its edges. The blood clots and eventually the surface of the clot dries out and becomes hard, forming a scab. During the first 24 hours the scab shrinks, drawing the edges of the wound closer together. If the scab sloughs off or is removed after about a week, a layer of reddish granulation tissue will be seen to have covered the cut edges of the subcutaneous tissue. Gradually a pearly, grayish, thin membrane extends out from the skin edge; eventually it covers the whole surface. The actual area of the wound, meanwhile, is steadily reduced by a process of contraction; finally, there is no raw surface to be seen.
The thin linear scar that forms is at first red and raised above the level of the surrounding skin but gradually fades until it is considerably paler than the surrounding skin. For many weeks after the scar forms, this process of contracture continues as is shown by the gradual shortening of the wound. Wounds that cross normal “skin lines” tend, after several months, to widen and become depressed below the level of the surrounding skin. Scars do not tan in sunlight, and they produce neither hair nor sweat, all evidences of the failure of the skin to return to full function.
Microscopically one can observe in the clot the whole process of the development of fibrin that causes the clot to contract, the arrival of the white blood cells and the macrophages that digest the debris in the wound, and the growth of blood capillaries followed by the growth inward of fibrous tissue migrating from the cells on the margin of the wound. The fibres arising from these cells can be identified and seen to increase, eventually filling the wound cavity with a network of interlacing threads of the protein collagen that, influenced by lines of tension, finally range themselves in firm bands. Meanwhile, the surface of the wound is being covered by a process of enlargement and flattening and by multiplication of the preexisting skin cells at the edge of the wound. These covering, or epithelial, cells start very early to spread down into the wound, clearing a way for themselves beneath the scab, perhaps by the production of an enzyme that dissolves the deeper layers of the crust. Eventually the proliferating epithelial sheets from the two sides of the wound coalesce to heal the wound superficially.