Galen on anatomical procedures : de Anatomicis administrationibus / translation of the surviving books with introduction and notes by Charles Singer.

  • Galen
Date:
1956
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Galen on anatomical procedures : de Anatomicis administrationibus / translation of the surviving books with introduction and notes by Charles Singer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    43/326 (page 11)
    One may be put thus. The three larger digits, thumb, index, and middle finger, are moved sideways toward the litde finger by a single muscle [extensor pollicis longus, extensor indicts plus extensor digiti tertii proprius, the last absent in man]. This arises from the bone in the forearm, but produces three tendons of its own near the wrist. These pass into the side of the hands and cause their oblique motion. Another way may be put thus. Two muscles resting on the forearm on the outside^^ initiate the lateral movement of these 240 three fingers. One muscle is inserted into the middle/finger [extensor digiti tertii proprius] and index/finger [extensor indicis] with a single tendon, being attached to the bone of the forearm over a very large area. The other muscle extends with a single tendon, just as it itself is single, and draws the thumb as it were towards the index [extensor pollicis lon^us]. Its head is in the upper parts of the arm, near the elbow^joint, and after a short distance it ends in a tendon which extends by the side of the muscle that moves the middle and index fingers. The two methods differ less in what they seek to express than in their way of expressing it. The second, which says that two muscles are involved, is more accurate, since the muscle moving the thumb obviously has its own outline, but the first is not to be rejected entirely, seeing that the muscles have some/' thing in common and lie together, united by thin fibres. Still more will a false impression of disagreement arise from the accounts of the tendon which moves the thumb and wrist. 241 For here too one can say that the muscle is forked—as in fact the anatomists have said—because it obviously has both a single head and a single outline, though at the end of the radius, by the wrist, it yields two tendons [one for the thumb and one for the two adjacent fingers]. However, anyone concerned about precision would do better to say that there is not one muscle here, but two, however closely united from the head to the point of divisions into tendons. It is fair to treat them as two, both because, if properly separated, they are found completely distinct, and also because they move parts different in nature.