Medicine: Pitkin’s Bone Hammer

At Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, surgeons who needed to chisel and cut bones were last week using for their operations a pneumatic hammer adapted by a young surgeon who, despite his father’s plan for him to become a missionary in China, had through the force of impulse become a medico—Horace Collins Pitkin.

Surgeon Pitkin’s device, which was described technically in the July number of The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, consists of a small pneumatic hammer originally designed by the Chicago Pneumatic Tool Co. to grave carvings and letterings on stone and to do delicate riveting. Its over-all length is eight inches, its net weight three and a half pounds. It delivers 3,800 blows a minute, each blow a light tap. But the sum of their rapid succession, when applied to the surgeon’s bone-cutting chisel or osteotome, carves away bone precisely to the surgeon’s design.

The power supply of the Pitkin bone hammer consists of an ordinary small compressor unit. Seventy pounds pressure of air, delivered to the hammer, is all that is used at Massachusetts General Hospital where Surgeon-Inventor Pitkin has been at work. In experiments more than 70 pounds pressure shattered the bones of cadavers, although bones of living patients can stand greater battering without splitting untowardly. The chief problem in perfecting the device was to get the power air sterile enough for the operating room. That Surgeon-Inventor Pitkin accomplished by passing the air through an alcohol filter.

The advantages of such a pneumatic hammer-chisel in the hands of the bone surgeon are: abundant power under perfect control; speeding without tendency of charring the bone that is being cut; accurate tooling of the bone with a minimal risk of accidental fracture; ability to operate in deep wounds through small openings.

Disadvantages: lack of portability (air supply is stationary or clumsy to move); noise, which might bother some operators and would certainly bother patients having a bone chiseled under local anesthesia, while conscious.

“Lao-man, tell the mother of little Horace to tell Horace that his father’s last wish was that when he is 25 years of age, he should come to China as a missionary.” Horace Tracy Pitkin, Congregational missionary at Paotingfu, Chili Province, China, said this one noisome summer day in 1901 to his faithful Chinese letter-carrier and general servant, Kuo Lao-man. Pastor Pitkin had some months before sent his wife and only child, Horace Collins Pitkin, then a scrappy three-year-old, back to Mrs. Pitkin’s home at Troy, Ohio. His command to Kuo Lao-man was his last message. Next day Chinese Boxers, uprising, slew him foully.

When Baby Horace Collins Pitkin grew old enough to understand the answers to his questions, he learned the weight of his father’s martyrdom. When he grew old enough to read men’s books he read Robert E. Speer’s A Memorial of Horace Tracy Pitkin,* which told how the slain man had as a boy been skilled in mechanics, had treated school studies as chores essential to be done in spite of dislike, had for two years of his young manhood been undecided whether to study medicine or theology. He took up religion and, with Sherwood Eddy and Henry W. Luce, developed the Students’ Volunteer Movement, which at the end of the 1890’s did so much to enliven religious activities in U. S. colleges. Having ended Union Theological Seminary studies, he took his wife, who had herself studied medicine, to China. There their baby was born in 1898 (the excitement interrupted one of the young father’s most interesting letters), teethed, had colic, caught the grip, grew stout.

All through Horace Collins Pitkin’s adolescence sounded the cry to missionary work in China: “. . . his father’s last wish. . . .” The father’s desires were to live in the son’s works. No matter if the son’s works had better lean from the father’s wants. It was difficult.

So into his young manhood the son was undecided whether to study medicine or theology. He took up medicine.

*The Cleveland Public Library’s circulating copy of this memorial book had, until last week, its leaves uncut. Horace Tracy Pitkin, as missionary, represented Cleveland’s Pilgrim Church.