Page 19 - Reconstructive Techniques in Musculoskeletal Tumor Surgery

Figure 8: Painting of the “Miracle of the Black Leg” by Pedro de Berreguete in the 15th century AD. The Saints removed the right leg of a church retainer, which was a ected by a tumor, and replaced it with the leg of a Moor who had died that morning67.
Various case reports were published in the years that followed. However, it was not before the early 1970s that the rst series on patients with allograft reconstructions for bone tumors were published by groups led by Volkov (Moscow, Russia), Parrish (Houston, United States) and Ottolenghi (Buenos Aires, Argentina)69-72. Many advances in the eld of allotransplantation had been made in the years before. These included techniques to freeze allografts following procurement and to thaw them during tumor resection, and resulted in an enormous decrease in the risk of allograft rejection67. The progress in the use of bone allograft can in part be attributed to e orts of the United States Navy, which became interested in preservation of human bone following the Second World War. Also, it has been claimed that the US navy founded the rst ‘bone bank’67.
Around the same time, other groups experimented with major prosthetic reconstruction for large osseous defects, including those caused by tumor resections22, 73. The rst known report on metallic hip replacement was published in 1942 by Austin T. Moore and Harold R. Bohlmann who replaced the proximal half of the femur in a patient with a recurrent giant cell tumor of bone with a vitallium endoprosthesis ( gure 9)74. In 1949, in the United Kingdom, the rst large
General introduction
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