ABSTRACT
A large part of the practice of orthopaedics does concern children: fractures and dislocations, including birth injuries, congenital deformities such as spinal curvature, congenital dislocation of the hip and club foot, infectious diseases such as poliomyelitis and tuberculosis, as well as rare bone tumours of childhood. The operative treatment of orthopaedic diseases was, of course, limited by the pre-Listerian risk of infection. The specialty of orthopaedic surgery is conveniently divided into the management of trauma to bones and joints, and the elective treatment of diseases of the structures. The treatment of injuries of bones and joints goes back to the earliest days of surgery, since the most primitive of practitioners would have been called upon to bind up injuries and to splint fractures. William Arbuthnot Lane pioneered the use of screw fixation of fractures, which he commenced in 1893, and by 1905, he had introduced his special perforated stainless steel strips for plating fractures of the long bones.
