Medicine: New Bones for Old

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To patch broken bones doctors use everything from rope to chromium nails. Last week in the Lancet, venerable Dr. Ernest William Hey Groves, emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Bristol, told how he had successfully used hunting trophies and soupbones as scaffolding for fractured arms and legs. Examples:

Walrus tusks. In 1922 Dr. Groves examined a farm boy with a deep cavity in the upper end of his thighbone. No scrap of human bone that Dr. Groves could safely snip from the boy was large enough to fill the space, so he procured a piece of ivory from a walrus tusk, carved it to order, planted it in the cavity. Last October, said Dr. Groves, "a fresh radiogram [Xray] showed that the ivory graft had remained without change as a strut round which human bone had been deposited." Since the operation the patient "has never had any disability or illness."

Soupbone. A ten-year-old boy with an infected humerus (upper-arm bone) broke his arm while throwing a cricket ball. Dr. Groves cut and shaped two pieces of beef-bone, scraped out some marrow in each end of the boy's broken humerus, drove one piece of beef-bone up the humerus, the other down, and joined them together with metal bolts. The boy recovered in six weeks and within ten years the beef-bone was almost entirely absorbed in new bone tissue which had grown around it. The metal bolts remained embedded in the bone but did no harm. "By a curious chance," said Dr. Groves, "[the boy] became a very tall athlete and actually won the weight-throwing competition in the inter-varsity sports."

Antlers. A 45-year-old woman consulted Dr. Groves because she had broken the top of her thighbone a year before and it had not united. To nail the knob back on the patient's thighbone, Dr. Groves needed a solid, rodlike bone. He remembered that stags' antlers, which sprout afresh every year, are homogeneous, have no marrow cavity. So he ordered a branch of antlers, carved a bone peg three inches long, three-eighths of an inch wide, and nailed the head back onto her long thighbone. "A year later [the patient] could walk so well that it was impossible to detect which had been the damaged leg. . . . Within three years the bone peg had been completely absorbed and replaced by the human bone."