DENTAL STONE

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4325, 3 August 1937, Page 7

DENTAL STONE

CAST FOR BROKEN LEGS A STORY FROM AMERICA Dental stone, from which dentists secure tooth impressions, was tried successfully in America as a cast to cure broken legs of two American two-year-olds. The story comes from the ‘ Reader’s Digest,’ and begins on Labour Day, 1934, during the Gibson Handicap at River Downs, a race track 12 miles from Cincinnati.

“ The favourite was Prince Pine, a two-year-old who had already broken one record,, and was all set to be the favourite for the Kentucky Derby the following spring. “ That afternoon, he was winning easily when ho stumbled and broke his near foreleg. The lower part of it hung limp as an armless sleeve.

“ Now, the vets, know only one way to set a horse’s leg. If the plaster cast is not to slip or chip, the wretched creature must be trussed up in a canvas sling for two or three weeks to keep its weight off the ground.

“ But this method puts such pressure on the horse’s belly that it wrecks its lungs and liver, and long before the bone can set the patient usually dies of pneumonia.

“ DON’T SHOOT HIM.” “ So, at the tracks, even when a horse is beyond price for breeding purposes, the moment a leg is broken the order is to shoot. ” Therefore, at River Downs that day, tradition had a bullet with Prince Pine’s name on it. Rut something deflected that bullet, and recently 1 saw Prince Pine tearing about a meadow in a state of almost unbearable exuberance, nothing at all the matter with

that foreleg. “ Prince Pine owes his present wellbeing to the blessed chance that among the spectators that September Day was a Cincinnati dentist and his wife. When the disaster happened, the dentist’s wife obeyed an impulse. Down out of the grandstand, under the rail, across the track she ran, calling out: ‘ You must not shoot him.’

“ The dentist, following in her wake, supported her, but all the vets, argued that Prince Pine didn’t have a chance, and the track authorities said they could not have a bunged-up horse on their hands. “ At last the trainer told the dentist he could ‘do what he liked, and half an hour later these two impractical people from Cincinnati found themselves in charge of a truck into which they hoisted the hapless two-year-old.

BORE HIS WEIGHT “ Necessity gave birth to invention. The dentist set that foreleg and put a cast on it; but he made the cast of something that had never before been used for such a purpose—made it of stuff in his own office. The stuff called dental stone —the plaster out of which, for 15 years, dentists have' been fashioning' the moulds they make for bridgework. “ It provided a cast which solidified more rapidly and was far stronger than any previously dreamed of. So hard that Prince Pine could kick it all he liked without chipping it. So strong that within a day it could bear his weight. “ Two days later there came to the dentist’s office a telephone call from River Down’s. ‘ Got another broken leg out here. Another two-year-old, Prince Kiev. Want to do anything about it?’

“ The dentist got his wife on the phone. ‘ Sure, if we’ve got one, we might as well have two.’ Before sundown Prince Kiev was delivered at the stable where already Prince Pine was pawing the floor with his plastered hoof.

And what’s happened to Prince Kiev?

“ He was away the day I dropped in, being galloped, getting ready to race at Latonia.”

CAN BE MENDED. It’s a pretty story, but technically inaccurate.

“ Eighty per cent, of fractures can be mended,” declared the Randwick veterinary surgeon, Mr Roy Stewart. “ The impression that a horse’s broken leg cannot knit is* incorrect. Admittedly there are certain parts that don’t lend themselves to easy repair. The tension of the muscles and the bruising that accompany a fracture are so intense thfit sometimes the surrounding tissue dies. “ Horses are never put in slings if it can be avoided, and the slings are onlv used to prevent the risk of a horse’s lying on the offending part and causing further displacement, but the slings have no effect on the lungs and do not produce pneumonia. “ T don’t know whether dental stone has ever been used in Australia for a cast, but it is commonly used for plugging up holes in a horse’s hoof,” said Mr Stewart.