THE TREATMENT OF CONGENITAL CLUBFEET

Abstract

The treatment of congenital clubfeet has presented an interesting but difficult problem since the history of early medicine. The lack of agreement among orthopedic surgeons as to the best method of treatment and the presence of many partially corrected or relapsed cases in every community today indicate that the present treatment is not as efficacious as might be desired, or that it has been improperly administered. This study was made for two purposes: first to determine the efficiency of some methods, as judged by a study of the results, and, second, to determine some of the factors that influence treatment. Two hundred consecutive cases have been chosen for study. y. The personal equation has been eliminated in this series by the fact that every treatment in each case was given personally by me. Hippocrates gave the first description of a clubfoot and taught that the condition was remediable, and that