Surgical essays.

  • Cooper, Astley, Sir, 1768-1841.
Date:
1818
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Surgical essays. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    Disloca- tions from relaxation. is smoothed upon its inner surface, to leave no projecting parts which can interrupt the motion of the bone in its new situation. The muscles losing their action become con- tracted and greatly diminished in their size. But although dislocations happening from vio- lence are thus accompanied by the laceration of the ligament of the joint, yet they can occur from relaxation of the ligaments only. A girl came to my house, who had the power of throwing her patella off the surfaces of the condyles of the os femoris. Her knees were bent considerably inwards, and when the rectus muscle acted upon the patella, it was drawn from the thigh-bone into a line with the tuber- cle of the tibia, and laid nearly flat upon the side of the external condyle of the femur. She came from the south of Europe, and said she had been brought up as a dancing girl from her earliest years, as we see children dancing upon elevated platforms in the streets of London; and she imputed to these continued exertions the weakness under which she laboured. A relaxed state of ligaments is also produced by an accumulation of synovia in joints. Mr. Shillito, surgeon in the city, asked me to see the servant of a gentleman in my neighbourhood, who had a great enlargement of the knee-joint from an unnatural and abundant secretion of synovia j and when this was absorbed, the liga- ments remained so much relaxed, that the e^ forts of the muscles in walking dislocated the pa- tella. I ordered her into the hospital that the