ABSTRACT
Early views on ETAP Sports physicians and kinesiologists have made repeated claims that the phenomenon of the athlete’s “stitch” in the side was described by both Pliny the Elder and Shakespeare (for example2-5). However, such assertions have dubious merit. Pliny was suggesting a remedy of dubious efficacy for a condition where the body was arched violently backwards: “For the painful cramp, attended with inflexibility, to which people give the name of opisthotony, the urine of a shegoat is injected into the ears” (Pliny the Elder, Book 28, Chapter 52). Likewise, in The Tempest (l. 326-328), Shakespeare has Prospero speak of a night-time cramp, apparently unrelated to any form of physical activity: “tonight thou shalt have cramps, side-stitches, that shall pen thy breath up; urchins shall, for that vast of night that they may work, all exercise on thee”. The condition was briefly mentioned by Mossler in a nineteenth-century German medical text,6 and was the subject of vigorous discussion during the
1920s and 1930s, with many rival explanations of physiopathology summarized by Kugelmass7 and Capps.3 More recently, interest in this problem was rekindled by the research of Koistinen et al. in Finland8 and by Morton and his colleague in Australia.1
