For instance, say someone had deep open wounds on the pads of their thumb and index finger. If they were to hold the two fingers together with the areas of raw flesh touching each other for a week or so, would the two fingers eventually become fused together?
That’s basically the point of stitches. They hold the two bits of skin together, so that they can heal.
Normally it’s a good thing, as when you have a cut, it’s sewn together and heals. It would be a bad thing in your example (one assumes) and in this true story:
My son broke his finger playing football. Coach told him it was dislocated, yanked it and sent him back in. Weeks later, we find out it was broken and the coach’s yank had sent the chipped-off piece of bone lower into his finger. The little bit had healed onto the finger bone in the wrong place! They had to open up his finger and use a chisel (or the medical equivalent thereof) to break that little puppy off and put it back where the divot was in his finger bone. Yikes!
This was a very memorable part of the classic novel Johnny Tremain - Johnny’s hands are burned in an accident and his fingers fuse together.
Back when I worked inside computer cases a lot, I tore my thumb up something fierce on the knuckle side. I was super-careful with it, treated it with Neosporin and kept it well covered.
By the end of the week, it had healed so well that I couldn’t bend the knuckle; the ridges had fused together where they’d healed. I had to purposely cut the skin in a perpendicular fashion to allow my thumb to flex.
My brother was in S. Korea in the US Army when he got hepatitis from eating the local food. There was a little Korean girl there as a result of poor first aid for a burned hand. The village medic had slapped on some antibiotic and wrapped up her hand like a mitten. When the bandage was taken off, the fingers had healed together. The parents brought her to the army hospital. After a few weeks of surgery and treatment, she was good as new.
Not just tissue and skin, bones too. I broke one of my toes and, following my mom’s incorrect advice that nothing can be done for a broken toe, just taped it to the next toe over and let it heal. But it healed crooked, which prompted me to finally – too late – go to the foot doctor. He said the bone pieces had fused and the only way to fix the crookedness was to re-break the toe and set it correctly. I passed on that. Thus ended my dreams of being a toe model.
Bart: They should call this book Johnny Deformed!
Almost the EXACT same thing happened to me, although due to my own stupidity rather than bad advice.
When I was 11, we used to play a game in school called “fatball” which was just like baseball, except you used a volleyball or one of those rubber handballs instead of a baseball. I misjudged a fly ball in the outfield and “caught” the volleyball right on the end of my right pinky. I was in incredible pain, but just assumed it was badly sprained. A couple of months later (!) when I still didn’t have full range of motion with it, I finally mentioned and showed it to a doctor, who told me the same thing that Jodi’s doctor told her – with the same result.
In my adult life, I do get some pleasure out of freaking people out by showing them my warped pinky, though.
Can the body glue things together through healing? Maybe, if it’s sexual healing…
That’s why skin transplants work. When health care wasn’t like it is today, a person with a burnt hand may have found the fingers fused together after it healed up.