Points in the therapeutics of diseases of the joints / by A.B. Judson.

  • Judson, Adoniram Brown, 1837-1916.
Date:
[1886]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Points in the therapeutics of diseases of the joints / by A.B. Judson. 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.

    2/6 (page 2)
    however, and tested by time, it is better not to disappoint our patients, but to give them the assurance that they will receive at our hands all that the present state of science can grant. In the second place, I think obscurity has been caused by the mistaken precedence which has been unwittingly given to mechanics over pathology. The machinery of the joint being out of order, and certain muscles abnor- mally contracted, we have concluded that it is a question of dynamics, and that the pressure incident to muscular action is the cause of the destruction of cartilage and , bone. Instead of prudently stopping to verify this con- clusion by the examination of morbid specimens, which prove that reflex muscular action plays but an insignificant part, we seek a mechanical remedy for what appears to be a mechanical lesion, and invent an apparatus for counteracting the muscles. And when the apparatus is adjusted and the symptoms abate we congratulate our- selves and imagine that the relief experienced is a proof that the muscles were causing all the mischief, failing to see that we cannot directly oppose the muscular action at all, and that, without knowing it, we have fortunately been applying fixation, which is a constant accompani- ment of traction, and which a timely resort to pathology would have told us was the very thing which the inflamed joint needed. I have none of my fellow-workers in view (we have all been followers of Dr. Henry G. Davis), but have simply tried to show how pathology and me- chanics have failed to walk hand in hand, as they should have done, in the treatment of joint diseases. The thera- peutical precepts suggested above have been expressed