Summary The paper presents myocardial contusion and penetrating cardiac war wounds. The authors report their experience with thirteen cases of penetrating wounds, out of which only two were treated in the conditions acceptable for surgery. The other 11 wounds were treated in war hospitals which were mostly improvised, and in mobile surgical teams. The basic, exclusively physical examination methods are described here, with the emphasis that “it is better to open and see than wait and see”. Such procedure gave the results that could be compared with the best ones in the literature (only one death). Three, conditionally speaking, specific cases are presented: one tangential wound with relapsing hemorrhage and two spontaneously sanitized ventricle wounds followed by other kinds of complications.
