Stump after Stephen Smith’s amputation at knee.
The Knee.
—It was Brinton who, in 1872, suggested the preservation of the semilunar cartilages in all knee disarticulations, as in this way all the normal relations are preserved and retraction is prevented. But the makers of prosthetic apparatus have urged to abandon all true disarticulations, and to substitute for them the supracondyloid method, which affords ideal stumps. Disarticulations are supposed to produce less shock, less loss of blood, and less danger of sepsis from opening up the bone-marrow, while muscle insertions are less disturbed and the stump covering usually is mobile and not very sensitive. No disarticulation should be thought of unless the joint involved be free from disease and unless about it there be met sufficient healthy integument to furnish a satisfactory flap.
For a true disarticulation Stephen Smith’s bilateral method is now almost universally adopted. Here the incision is begun one inch below the tubercle of the tibia and is carried directly down to the bone, downward and forward around the side of the leg, and then inward and upward toward the middle of the popliteal space, the lateral flaps thus made being nearly duplicates. The flaps thus cut out are completely separated from the bone up to the joint level, where the ligaments are divided, the joint being manipulated as may be necessary to best expose them and facilitate division. In this operation the patella is usually removed, the joint being opened by separating its ligament at its insertion into this bone. One should remember that the internal condyle is lower and longer than the external, and that the internal flap should be perhaps made on this account a little the longer of the two. [Fig. 710] illustrates the stump resulting from this operation and shows the cicatrix drawn up out of harm’s way and resting in the fossa between the condyles. [Fig. 711] illustrates the simple method by lateral flaps.
Fig. 711
Amputation at knee by lateral flap. (Erichsen.)
Amputation of the Thigh.
—Under this head, rather than that of amputation at the knee, should be described the supracondyloid amputations which give decidedly the best results of all, and which are preferable to any others for the middle of the lower extremity. Of these the best is that suggested by Gritti, which consists in not only removing the condyles but sawing off the articular surface of the patella, which is then drawn upward and applied to the end of the femur, the division of the latter being made at a point above the condyles, where the diameter of both bones will nearly correspond, this latter perhaps being a suggestion of Stokes rather than of Gritti, who did not divide the bone quite so high. (See [Fig. 712].)
Fig. 712