This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Humanities  • History of Medicine  • Violence and Human Rights  • War  • Alert me on articles by topic

Ira M. Rutkow, MD, MPH, DrPH

Arch Surg. 2002;137:1199.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

MANY LIVES AND LIMBS were saved by the widespread use of fracture splints during the Civil War. Understandably, there was little concern about the protection of upper extremity fractures because most of these patients could sit upright in an ambulance and help adjust themselves. This was not the case, however, with lower limb fractures, particularly those of the femur. Injuries to the hip were considered the gravest of all wounds; these patients suffered terribly, not only on the battlefield but following attempts at stabilization of the bony fragments. Ever more ingenious lower extremity fracture splints were devised, and the use of instruments designed by Nathan Ryno Smith (1797-1877), Gurdon Buck (1807-1877), and John Hodgen (1826-1882) represents one of the high points of Civil War surgery.

At the beginning of the war, the army's medical department furnished Smith's anterior splint as an aid in the . . . [Full Text of this Article]