On the muscles of the back / by Holmes Coote.

  • Coote, Holmes, 1817-1872.
Date:
[1851]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the muscles of the back / by Holmes Coote. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ON THE MUSCLES OF THE BACK. By holmes COOTE, F.K.C.S. DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY AT ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S HOSPITAL, ETC. ETC. Read on Thursday, Jan. 30, 1851. Were any illustration needed to show how a single error in anatomy, once established and allowed to pass, rapidly produces other errors, until the descrip- tion of that department of the animal frame to which it refers is reduced to a state of utter confusion, none better could be selected than the commonly received account of the muscles of the back, which renders almost imintelli- gible a region the simplest and the most tyj)ical in the whole body. 1 can- not refrain from expressing my sui-prise that such a scandal should be permitted to exist. The complicated muscular apparatus which moves the highly de- veloped limbs in man is taught with a degree of tedious minuteness, without the proper reference in its relations to the firm yet moveable column of sup- port, constituted by the succession of bony segments teiTued the vertebrae. The cause of all this error lies in the glaring inaccuracies which are still, to our shame, interwoven with the descrip- tion of the skeleton. Whilst the same name is applied to totally different parts of a vertebra, difierent names are ap- plied to the same parts; and hence muscular fibres which extend from cor- responding points of bone, pursuing a simply longitudinal course, are described with a multiplicity of terms, as most erratic, planless, and incomprehensible. With the present system of osteology, it is impossible to describe the simplest muscles of the body; and no one feels the least reluctance to confess that he knows nothing whatever of the “ region of the back.” In addition to osteological errors, we have to encounter the annoyance of a most arbiti’ary and faulty muscular nomenclature. It really seems a prac- tical joke, that anatomists say, thus far shall be sacro-lumbalis, and thus far musculus accessorius ad sacro-lumba- lem ; thus far shall be semispinalis colli; thus far multifidus spin®. Of late years we have had the re-introduc- tion of some rotatores spin®. Where are they, forsooth, if they owe not their being to the patience, ingenuity, and manipulation of the dissector ? No candid person will hesitate to say that to make these muscles correspond with description he has invariably cut them into shape. For the better illusHation of these parts as they ai'e seen in mim, let us take the skeleton of the common snake. It is composed of a series of moveable vertebrae, of which none are coalesced save the vertebr® of the head; all others play freely in a ball-and- socket joint, there being neither sacrum nor coccyx. These vertebrae are moved by the following muscles:— 1. The spinalis dorsi (Cuvier), arising from the lateral face of the spinous processes, and directed from before back- wards, divides at its inner side into as many fasciculi as there are vertebr®, each fasciculus terminating in a long tendon contained in a tendinous sheath. The muscle then composed of tendinous and fleshy fibres, extends from vertebra to vertebra, attached to the most pos- terior of the bony levers of the column, namely, to the spinous processes. 2. The longissimus dorsi arises fi’om “ tbe extremity of the point of the an-