The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-11-16
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS.
Ancient Attempts to Replace Lost Mem.
 bers in Man.

 Ancient Attempts to Replace Lost Mem
 bers in Man.
 Belzoni and others found in an an- cient sarc0phaglfs artificial teeth made of sycamore wood. 4 set of artificial teeth of the bridgework system was all so found in an Etruscan skull of about 200 4. D. Plaster restorations of the nose, ears and lips are clearly described in Susruta about 300 B. c. But the earliest representation of an artificial limb is that of a satyr who is depicted with a wooden leg on a Graeco-R Roman vase in a collection at the Louvre in Paris. In a Graeco- Roman mosaic there is also sportsman represented with wooden leg. Both of these are probably of the pre-Christian period.
 The oldest artificial leg still in exist enc was found in a tomb in Capua, It. ally, and is now preserved in the muse um of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, where it is thus desribed in the catalogues:
 Roman artificial leg; the artificial limb accurately represents the form of the leg; it is made with pieces of thin bronze, fastened by bronze nails to a wooden core. Two iron bars, having holes at their free ends. are attached to the upper extremity of the bronze; quadrilateral piece of iron, found near the position of the foot, is thought to have given strength to 1t. There is no trace of the foot, and the wooden core had nearly crunbled away. The skele- ton had it's waist surrounded by belt of sheet bronze, edged with small riv- cts, probably used to fasten leather lining. Three painted vases (red fig ures on a black ground) lay at the feet of the skeleton. The vases belong to rather advanced period in the de- cline of art (about 300 years B. C.)"
 We learn from Herodotus that an Elean captured by Spartans and con fined in stocks as a torture preliminary to the infliction of death amputated his own imprisoned foot, escaped, and later procured a wooden foot. Pliny reords that Sergius, 167 B. C., wore an artific- ial hand and fought with it. A we'll authenticated prosthesis was the iron hand made in 1904 for Goetz von Ber- lichingen, a knight of Nuremberg. It was clumsy structure, but an ingen- ious one. By means of buttons and levers it accomplished certain finger movements. Half a century later Ann prose Pare described an iron prosthesis that had been devised for Huguenot captain, whose arm had been lost in the seize of FOntenoy.
 It was at that time, viz, in the six teenth century, when a new impetus was given to surgery by the genius of Pare, that efforts were made to supply sub stitutes for missing legs that would be more than mere supports. It is not un- reasonable to suppose that Fares ap- plication of the ligature to amputations in place of boiling oil, decreasing the agonies of the operation and increasing the number of recoveriss, had much to do with the interest given Ito the man ufacture of artificial limbs.
 Pare himself devised an apparatus with a knee joint which, while usually fixed. could be moved by means of a thong running to the hip. Leather and paper and glue were soon employed in- stead of iron. The prosthesis were made by mechanics of; all sorts, but a few of them acquired celebrity by their