Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Action of Muscles: Including Muscle Rest and Muscle Re-Education
As the muscles of the human body are adaptive or survival results of struggles which have gone on during the past ages, it follows that some appreciation of their comparative anatomy is essential for the clinician. It is inconceivable that any one should attempt to handle a paralysed deltoid or quadriceps without some knowledge of its ancestral history, or of the entities of which its function is composed.
Muscle fibre is delicate, sensitive, and responsive. It can be coaxed but not driven. It should be conserved and not indiscriminately torn or cut through at surgical opera tions as though of no account. In anv orthopaedic condition the muscle should be looked on as a friend, ready to do our bidding if placed under proper control. It should not be asked to do 80 units of work when it is capable of performing only 40 units. When we read in the works of H. 0. Thomas such an expression as which the muscles appear to know, we instinctively feel that when Thomas treated diseases of the hip the muscular sentinels of the joint were all personalities to him. In this way also were muscles regarded by John Hunter, Charles Bell, Haller, and Cowper, who all devoted a large part of their scientific life to the study of motion. It seems extraordinary that learned discourses should be devoted to a nerve case, and that the muscles, through loss of whose function the disease has perhaps been recognized, are so often considered as unworthy of even physiological rest.
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