The apparatus used by the Greek and Romans in the setting of fractures and the reduction of dislocations.

  • Milne, John Stewart, 1871-
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The apparatus used by the Greek and Romans in the setting of fractures and the reduction of dislocations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    21/62 (page 9)
    Nothing, however, is more convenient than a cushion or something similar, either of wool or linen and not hard. It is to be made hollowed along its middle, and laid below the limb. In any case a shawl should encircle both splint and limb, as children are swathed in bed. Paulus ^gineta describes the box splints as of wood or earthenware. Some applied them only in cases of compound fracture. A better means of steadying the limb, he thinks, is to make a long pillow of a garment, and to fold it up at the sides, round the limb, and to steady the whole with pillows. The garment should be lined with a skin, to catch the embrocations. Galen says that they should be rounded externally and hollowed in- side. They were made of different kinds of wood. Celsus says that they should have in their lower part a hole for the escape of discharge, and they should have a foot plate. Glossocomium of Galen. This ingenious and useful splint, says Galen, had been invented by the practitioners of his time. It took its name, he says, from the Attic name for a box used for storing papers of value or which one wished to conceal or to carry on a journey, and was variously spelled glossocomum or glossocomium or with two t’s instead of two s’s. (Fig. 9.) It might be applied to the femur or the tibia, and was to be used continually till callus had formed. Galen gives a full description of it, but its principle is best under- stood from a drawing such as that given by Vidius or Scultetus. On rotating the handle the upper and lower fragments are simul- taneously pulled apart. Dislocations. The different varieties of dislocations of the joints were known to Hippocrates nearly as completely as we know them to-day, and the various manipulations necessary for their reduction are fully described. Cases which resisted reduction by means of ordinary measures, such as extension over the back of a chair or the lower half of a door in the case of the shoulder, were treated by more powerful apparatus, impro- vised or kept for the purpose. Bands for extension and counter-extension were applied. These con- sisted preferably of supple leather, but in the absence of these Hippoc- rates says that iron chains, cords, or the ropes for ships may be used, being wrapped round with woolen cloth at the parts where they are to come in contact with the skin. In reducing dislocations of the fingers, Hippocrates says that nooses formed from the twisted bast of palm shoots are suitable. Aristotle refers to these in his book on the Parts of Animals. The power to be applied was obtained by means of winches or drums on axles, levers, wedges, screws and pulleys. Hippocrates only mentions three of these: “Of all the mechanical instruments used by men the most powerful are these three, the winch.