tourniquet

plural tourniquets

1. medicineA tightly-compressed bandage used to stop bleeding by stopping the flow of blood through a large artery in a limb.

   After he was done, Lillehei's assistants released the tourniquet around Gregory's venae cavae, allowing blood to return.

   2018, Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: a History, →ISBN, page 83

   3 more examples

   His forefathers had been, as a rule, professional men—physicians and lawyers; his grandfather died under the walls of Chapultepec Castle while twisting a tourniquet for a cursing dragoon; an uncle remained indefinitely at Malvern Hill;[…].

   1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter II, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC

   […] Bull was in the bathroom taking his fix, clutching his old black necktie in his teeth for a tourniquet and jabbing with the needle into his woesome arm with the thousand holes;[…]

   1957 September 5, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, →OCLC

   Lanctot slipped the tourniquet around the other, just under his groin, and twisted it tight, clamping quadriceps and hamstring hard to bone. […] She carried her own tourniquets and bandages to every shift and surf session.

   2021 October 20, C. J. Chivers, “Fear on Cape Cod as Sharks Hunt Again”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 17 Feb 2022

2. Any of several similar methods of clamping components into position.
3. obsoleteA turnstile.

present singular third person tourniquets · participle present tourniqueting · participle present rare tourniquetting · participle past tourniqueted · past tourniqueted · participle past rare tourniquetted · past rare tourniquetted

1. To apply a tourniquet bandage.