Tissue Freezing and Local Cold Injury

HE HISTORICAL ASPECTS of cold injury have been dealt with frequently and at length in our scientific literature. It would be only redundant to indulge in extensive documentation of the problem which cold injury confers, particu-larly upon military operations, where estimates of cold injuries in recent campaigns alone run into millions. Each war brings a resurgence of cold injury accompanied by another shower of reports, experiments and statistics, testimony that the problem still is with us and that we are as yet unable to prevent or intelligently to treat this disease. Attempting a review of the past literature of this field in any organized fashion becomes a near impossibility as one is confronted by a web of clinical reports and experimental results, uncontrolled clinical procedures, misinterpretation and fre-quently a lack of agreement even on basic terminology. Research on this problem, whether dealing with human subjects or laboratory animals, has been predominantly clinical in nature; that is, the results of a more or less controlled trauma have been assessed in terms of the total result at the local or general physiological level. Such