Surgery

Wooden leg (3)

In ancient times, Romans and Greeks made prosthetic legs. In the 5th century BC. The Greek poet Aristophan described in his poem "The Birds" an invalid with a wooden leg. The historian Herodotus told in the 4th century BC. in his book "Calliope" (Book IX, Chapter 37), the story of the Thereupon Hegesistratus of Elea, which dates back to 484 BC. chopped off a foot to escape the Spartans - he continued to live with a wooden prosthesis. Plutarch repeats the story of Hegesistratus in his "Moralia 479 b". One of the oldest archaeological references to a prosthetic leg is the "Stavefoot of Capua" excavated in 1858, a bronze instrument dating back to around 300 BC. came [it was lost in 1942 in the bombing of London].

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Thigh amputations did not usually survive the patients. Until the 16th century, lower leg amputees helped themselves with simple wooden stilts. Ambroise PARE (1509-1590) designed a series of novel prostheses, with metal armor, a knee-articulated stalk and the "cuissard à pilon" used at the beginning of the 20th century. The prosthetic technique of everyday life was primitive. An exception was the leg of the "Kleine Lotharingers" from the 16th century. It was constructed in a tubular skeleton construction, with a sprung foot and locked knee joint, and was covered by a kind of knight's armor. It is a recurring example of craftsmanship and "high tech of the Middle Ages", comparable to the "Iron Hand of the Gotz von Berlichingen". For the well-to-do, in the 16th century, in addition to the stilts, there were already first prosthesis constructions. They had a sprung prosthetic foot and a movable knee joint. To sit, the knee was angled, it had to be locked when walking. Such prosthetics were unique items for the wealthy, in contrast to the stalk for the poor.

Ideal was the stilt for Unterschenkelamputierte. The remaining knee joint was bent and the rest of the lower leg was thrown up behind the thigh. In this way, the patient stood on his knee - a completely painless type of "kneeling" in which the stump was not loaded at all. Far less pleasant was the stilt for the thigh amputee. He "walked" on the painful stump, so to speak.

Famous bearer of a stilt leg was Peter Stuyvesant (1612-1672). In 1644, a cannonball had torn off his right lower leg [during the attack on the Portuguese island of St. Martin] - he had to be amputated (below the knee joint). In his native Holland, he had a wooden leg fabricated and from then on was called "Peg-leg-Pete". Equipped with the new leg, he set sail again - to what is now New York, where he became governor in 1647. A historical detail: during his administration, a first hospital was built in New Amsterdam (the southern tip of Manhattan, in what is now New York)!

Among the famous wooden leg bearers one should not forget the Dominican freedom fighter "Jambe de Bois", who "invented" the merengue dance in 1653, a dance in which only one leg is moved, the second is stiff. This anecdote just to show you that you can even be funny despite wooden leg!

- In 1589, Georg Rollenhagen (1542-1609) wrote his satire "The limping messenger" - the name was later the inspiration for the annual calendar, which appeared in 1676 in Basel, from 1707 in a French edition, 1851/52 in a Luxembourgish version "The limping of Luxembourg Messenger ", from which our grandparents received weather forecasts and other wisdom.

- In 1800 London prosthetist James POTTS designed a wooden leg, the "Anglesey leg", for Henry Paget Marquis of Anglesey, with toes raised above artificial tendons when the knee was flexed. Until the middle of the 19th century but the simple wooden stilts remained the usual leg replacement. Joiner, carpenter and village blacksmith shared the work - each copy was a custom-made.

- During the American Civil War (1861/65) 30,000 soldiers were amputated - a whole industry now lived to provide these people with prostheses.

The stilt was light and allowed a maneuverable walking. Turning around was a breeze! Despite the prosthesis but the war disabled could only exercise very simple professions. In 1878, Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) told in his story "Vor dem Sturm" about "old mothers, primitive tabloids, finally peduncles, who offered all sorts of leaflets in addition to the two Berlin newspapers". Some "Stelzfuss" came in its poverty on the wrong track. So Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) in his 1890 crime novel "The Sign of the Four", the villains by the woody Small embody ...

World War I left thousands of amputee veterans behind