WALKING WITH ARTIFICIAL LEGS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 4757, 3 January 1918, Page 2

WALKING WITH ARTIFICIAL LEGS.

A NEW SCIENCE

“Engineering” quotes a German professor to the effect that a deSigiier of artificial legs for invalided soldiers must not rely only on what ho is told bv the patient and on what his own eyes tell him. To see whether the limbs are really suitalbe requires a study such as the cinematograph enables the expert to conduct. hollowing the examples of Otto I ischei when first studying the walking of man, he fastened, by means of straps, Gessiler tubes to the outside of the legs of the subject, one along the thi fr h and one along the calf or the leo-7 The subject was then made to walk past the camera in a dark room. Revmond thus . obtained diagrams consisting of four lines in each case, representing the changes in the positions of the legs, and he scon noticed that a man with one sound log and one Artificial leg docs not walk normally, and a man with two artificial legs still less so. Normal walking is always progressive in space, but people with artificial limbs threw the limb forward too much and then drew it back again'. There was hence an unconscious waste of energy, and discomforts arose for which the inexperience of the invalid might be more responsible than the design and construction of the artificial limb.