Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. EXCISION OP JOINTS. Historical.—Beyond a passage ascribed to Hippocrates, but of very doubtful authenticity, and slight allusions in the works of Celsus and Paulus 3Egineta, the ancients give us no information whatever on this subject. Hippocrates says,—" Complete resections of bones in the neighbourhood of joints both in the foot, in the hand, in the tibia up to the malleoli, and in the ulna at its junction with the hand, and in many other places, are safe operations, if that fatal syncope does not at once occur, and continued fever does not attack the patient on the fourth day." Celsus and Egineta both advise the removal of protruding ends of bone in compound dislocations, but without giving any cases. From the days of these classic fathers of Surgery, we have hardly an indication of any attention whatever having been paid to their hints till quite within the last hundred years. The first distinct publication on the subject was by Henry Park of Liverpool, in a letter to Percival Pott in 1783. He proposed the removal of the articulating extremities of diseased elbow and knee-joints to obtain cures. He says he was led to this by its having been the invariable custom, for more than thirty years, at the Liverpool Infirmary, to take off the protruded extremities of bones in cases of compound dislocation. The chief credit, however, in practically elevating excisions into the catalogue of recognised surgical operations, is owing, British surgeons most cordially own, to two provincial surgeons of France, the Moreaus (father and son) of Bar-sur-Ornain. They took the lead in the most marked manner, having excised the shoulder in 1786, the wrist and elbow in 1794, knee and ankle in 1792, and had followed this up so well that, in 1803, the younger Moreau coul...