Medicine: Dog Splint for Human Legs

Metal splints for broken leg bones, originally invented by a veterinary for use on dogs, have proved so effective in treating human fractures that the U.S. Navy is now buying 1,000 of them a month. Last week a story in the Annals of Surgery introduced them to U.S. doctors generally.

The “Stader reduction splint” was devised in 1931 by Veterinary Otto Stader (of Ardmore, Pa.) because his canine patients gnawed plaster casts off their legs. When Drs. Kenneth Lewis and Lester Breidenbach of Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital saw a Stader splint on a dog, they were impressed at once with the fact that it drew the broken bones back into their normal position and served as a convenient splint while they grew together again.

In the Stader technique, a pair of metal pins is first driven through the flesh and well into each end of the fractured bone (see cut). For greater firmness the pins are driven in obliquely, as a carpenter drives a nail. Each set of pins is then locked into a pin-bar, and the two bars are bolted to a long extension rod, forming a sort of external auxiliary bone. The apparatus (weight: 2¼ Ib.) is made of a light aluminum alloy except for 1) the pins, which are stainless steel so that they will not corrode in contact with flesh and bone, 2) the pin-bars, which are plastic so they will not set up the tissue-irritating galvanic currents induced when different metals touch each other.

The pins remain embedded in the leg until the bones have united—usually eight to 16 weeks—but they have been left in place as long as 30 weeks without ill effects. After the pins are plucked out, the holes heal in about a week.

Advantages of the splint:

> It allows the patient to be transported almost as soon as his broken limb has been set—a fact of great importance to naval surgeons.

> It allows the patient to walk gently on his broken leg in about two weeks; to put his whole weight on it, without cane or crutch, in three weeks. > Thus it prevents the muscular atrophy and stiffening of the joints which commonly result from a plaster cast.