"Polio Derelicts"

"Polio derelicts" is the phrase which Orthopedist Walter Truslow of Brooklyn uses to describe all individuals crippled by infantile paralysis. Dr. Truslow, who believes that nearly all such deformities are due to lack of protective care of the muscles after an attack of poliomyelitis, last week made this high promise in the American Journal of Surgery:

"In the experience of the orthopedic surgeon, no victim of poliomyelitis should ever become a derelict; to him even the greatly disabled and deformed paralytic may be much improved and brought back to a high percentage of bodily, of social, of economic efficiency; moreover he knows of no reasonable age or duration since the attack in which means of ameliorating the condition of the cripple cannot be used to the victim's advantage. The writer, because he finds even in the medical profession very inadequate understanding of the possibilities and the methods of attaining these results, endeavors to point the way, by using and commenting on illustrative cases."

Dr. Truslow, after 40 years of orthopedic surgery, accomplishes his repairs by altering bones, muscles, tendons. He cited a dozen cases to show what he meant. One of them concerned a Miss T. S. who suffered a severe attack of infantile paralysis when she was 5. When Dr. Truslow saw her eight years later, "she walked with two crutches, right leg decidedly knock-kneed and with a flexion deformity, 20DEG outward rotation of leg, right foot in equinovarus; moderate scoliosis."

Dr. Truslow operated on her right shin bone, just below the knee, to correct the knock-knee, knee flexion and outward flexion of that leg.

The following year an operation stiffened her right ankle and a week later another operation stiffened her left ankle. Those operations corrected her club-footedness. But, although the deformities of the knee were overcome, the right knee "was practically flail." Determined to repair Miss T. S. to the utmost, Dr. Truslow stiffened her floppy right leg at the knee.

Final result: "At eighteen years, this girl, who had been greatly handicapped by paralytic disability and crippling deformities, was by no means a perfectly efficient machine, but was then able to walk with one cane and a slightly raised shoe. Had she not been so decidedly overweight, she could probably have discarded the one cane. As it was, she said she could walk half a mile."

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