Artificial Limbs

Publisher Marketing: GENERAL INTRODUCTION THE infinite variety of injuries which any war presents to the surgeon gives to military surgery a special interest and importance. The special interest and importance, in a surgical sense, of the great European War lies not so much in the fact that examples of every form of gross lesion of organs and limbs have been seen, for if we read the older writers rve find little in the moderns that is new in this respect, but is to be found in the enormous mass of clinical material which has been presented to us and in the production of evidence sufficient to eliminate sources of error in determining important conclusions. For the first time also in any campaign the labours of the surgeon and thc physician have had the aid of the bacteriologist, the pathoIogist, the physiologist and indeed of every form of scientific assistance in the solution of their respective problems. The clinician entered upon the great war armed with all thc re- sources which the advances of fifty years had made available. If the surgical problems of modern war can be said not to differ sensibly from the campaigns of the past, the form in which they have been presented is certainly as different as are the methods of their solution. The achievements in the field of discovery of the chemist, the physicist and the biologist have given the military surgeon an advantage in diagnosis and treatment which was denied to his predecessors, and rve are able to measure the effects of these advantages when we come to appraise the results which have been attained. But although we may admit the general truth of these statements it would be wrong to assume that modern scientific knowledge was, on the outbreak of the war, immediately useful to those to whom the wounded were to be confided. Fixed principles existed in all the sciences auxiliaryto the work of the surgeon, but our scientific resources were not immediately available at the outset of the great campaign scientific work bearing on problems had not been arranged in a manner adapted to the requirements, indeed the requirements were not fully foreseen the workers in thc various fields were isolated, or isolated themselves pursuing new researches rather than concentrating their powerful forces upon the one great quest. However brilliant the triumphs of surgery may be, and that they have been of surpassing splendour no one will be found to deny, experiences of the war have already produced a mass of facts sufficient to suggest the complete remodelling of our methods of education and research. The series of manuals, which it is my pIeasant duty to introduce to English readers, consists of translations of the principal volumes of the Horizon Colledion which has been appropriately named after the uniform of the French soldier. The authors, who are well-known specialists in the subjects which they represent, have given a concise but eminently readable account of the recent acquisi- tions to the medicine and surgery of war which had hitherto been disseminated in periodical literature. KO higher praise can be given to the Editors than to say that the clearness of exposition characteristic of the French original has not been lost in the rendering into English...