Seven-fingered hand cast "mirror hand," 1853 [WAM 00917]

Seven-fingered hand cast "mirror hand," 1853 [WAM 00917]

Polydactyly

Fingers

Abnormalities

Upper extremity

Wrist

Hand

Arm

Plaster casts

The subject was a German machinist, age thirty-seven. Born in 1815. The patient believed the hand was an advantage at playing the piano. He died of chronic diarrhea at Massachusetts General Hospital in March 1852. The limb was removed and dissected by Dr. F. S. Ainsworth. Known as a "mirror hand" the cast shows a hand lacking a thumb and consisting of a bisected mirror image of itself. Of the carpal bones, the trapezium and naviculare were wanting and the forearm consisted of two ulnae one of which was well formed, but no radius. The central finger received two extensor muscles; the malformation being regarded as a fusion, by radial edge, of the two extremities.

Plaster cast of adult hand and part of forearm showing seven well-developed and well-formed fingers, but no thumb.

Sawyer, Albert F.

1853

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A cast of the hand pre-dissection (Warren Anatomical Museum Catalog Number 6155) was created by the Boston Society of Medical Improvement.

Casts

American Journal of Medical Science, Volume 25, 1853, Page 91.

N. J. Barton, "Soft-Tissue Anatomy of Mirror Hand," The Journal of Hand Surgery, Vol. 11-B No. 3 October 1986.

T. Dwight, "Fusion of Hands," Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, 4: 437-486, and plates 43-44.

Proceedings of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, Page 276.

J. B. S. Jackson, "The Descriptive Catalogue of the Warren Anatomical Museum," (Boston: A. Williams & Company, 1870), 137-138.

image

physical object

Warren Anatomical Museum Catalog Number: 00917

The limb (WAM 6156) was removed post-mortem from a thirty-seven year old German machinist by Dr. F. S. Ainsworth of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement. Mr. Sawyer, a medical student, made the cast of the preparation and donated it to the Warren Museum in 1853.

Cast

11.5H x 16.5W x 28D cm