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this abstract to the Anatomischer Anzeiger in hopes that it will thus 
reach a greater number of my colleagues. I request that any who 
may write on this subject will consult, if possible, the original paper. 
Cases of polydactylism in which the increase of the number of 
fingers clearly springs from the fusion of two more or less complete 
hands and forearms are extremely uncommon. There are several, for 
the most part rather imperfect, accounts of this condition as seen in 
living persons, or in undissected specimens, or recorded in the plates 
of old authors, but there seems to be no dissection like the one about 
to be described in any museum, nor any description of a similar dis- 
section in literature. This one, indeed, was described forty years ago 
by Harvard’s distinguished Professor of Morbid Anatomy, the late 
Dr. J. B. S. Jackson, but the dissection had not been carried far 
enough to show some of the most important features, the account 
was inadequate, and in parts wanting in the anatomical accuracy which 
is so essential, but can hardly be expected from any other than a 
trained anatomist. Moreover the account appeared merely in an ab- 
stract of the Proceedings of the Boston Society for Medical Improve- 
ment which was published in the American Journal of the Medical 
Sciences, Vol. XXV, January, 1853, p. 91. It is practically buried. 
It is indexed in the Journal as „Malformation“ without any quali- 
fication whatever. Thus this most remarkable case is not mentioned 
by the most exhaustive writers on the subject. The specimen originally 
belonged to the cabinet of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement. 
which some years ago came into the possession of the Harvard Medical 
School. It seems proper to bring it forth from the obscurity in which 
it has remained so long, especially as it is particularly valuable in 
connection with a recent observation on the living by Dr. F. Jouiy !) 
of Berlin. 
The specimen is the left arm of a German machinist thirty-seven 
years old who died of chronic diarrhoea at the Massachusetts General 
Hospital in Boston in March, 1852. The arm was dissected and made 
into an old-fashioned dried and varnished preparation showing most 
of the muscles of the upper extremity and the chief arteries and 
nerves of the forearm and hand. The parts, of course, are much 
shrunken and distorted but the specimen has kept unchanged. There 
is no account of any deformity excepting of the left arm. From 
a hint in the hospital records and from an anecdote told by a physi- 
cian who remembered him, it may be inferred that the patient was 
1) Festschrift, Rupotr Virecnow gewidmet, Bd. I, Berlin 1891. 
