MILITARY MEDICAL MANUALS
General Editor:
SIR ALFRED KEOGH, G.C.B., M.D., F.R.C.P.
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS
BY
| A. BROCA | AND | DUCROQUET |
| Professor of Topographical Anatomy | Orthopædic Surgeon to the | |
| to the Faculty of Paris | Rothschild Hospital |
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
R. C. ELMSLIE, M.S., F.R.C.S.
Major R.A.M.C.(T.F.)
Orthopædic Surgeon to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Surgeon to
Queen Mary's Hospital, Roehampton
WITH 208 ILLUSTRATIONS
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, Ltd.
18 WARWICK SQUARE, LONDON, E.C. 4.
PARIS: MASSON ET CIE
120 BOULEVARD SAINT-GERMAIN
1918
The infinite variety of injuries which any war presents to the surgeongives to military surgery a special interest and importance. Thespecial interest and importance, in a surgical sense, of the greatEuropean War lies not so much in the fact that examples of every formof gross lesion of organs and limbs have been seen, for if we readthe older writers we find little in the moderns that is new in thisrespect, but is to be found in the enormous mass of clinical materialwhich has been presented to us and in the production of evidencesufficient to eliminate sources of error in determining importantconclusions. For the first time also in any campaign the labours ofthe surgeon and the physician have had the aid of the bacteriologist,the pathologist, the physiologist and indeed of every form ofscientific assistance in the solution of their respective problems.The clinician entered upon the great war armed with all the resourceswhich the advances of fifty years had made available. If the surgicalproblems of modern war can be said not to differ sensibly from thecampaigns of the past, the form in which they have been presentedis certainly as different as are the methods of their solution. Theachievements in the field of discovery of the chemist, the physicistand the biologist have given the military surgeon an advantage indiagnosis and treatment which was denied to his predecessors, and weare able to measure the effects of these advantages when we come toappraise the results which have been attained.
But although we may admit the general truth of these statements itwould be wrong to assume that modern scientific knowledge was, on theoutbreak of the war, immediately useful to those to whom the[vi] woundedwere to be confided. Fixed principles existed in all the sciencesauxiliary to the work of the surgeon, but our scientific resourceswere not immediately available at the outset of the great campaign;scientific work bearing on wound problems had not been arranged in amanner adapted to the requirements, indeed the requirements were notfully foreseen; the workers in the various fields were isolated, orisolated themselves pursuing new researches rather than concentratingtheir p