660 



OPERATIONS ON THE FOOT. 



Goodwin also has invented a very ingenious, but too compli- 

 cated shoe, comjiosed of three articulated pieces. From the center 

 of the median piece a prolongation of iron extends to the back of 

 the frog, and is of sufficient thickness to be perforated, the hole 

 having a thread through which a screw is introduced, running on 

 each side. The branches of the shoe have three nail-holes, and 

 from the inner border of the heel rises a clip so turned as to rest 

 on the origin of the bar. The mechanism of the shoe is easy to 

 understand, each branch being opened by the play of the screw 

 which passes through the prolongation of the median piece, one 

 extremity of which rests upon this prolongation, while the other 

 presses upon the inner border of the movable branch. 



The Goodwin shoe has been es- 

 sentially improved by Foures (Fig. 

 510). It is a bar shoe, the bar being 

 thicker than the rest of the shoe, 

 and wider than the ordinary bar 

 shoe. The bar is notched on each 

 side, and through each notch runs 

 a thread or vise which holds a mov- 

 able clip, which is made to rest on 

 the inside of the bars, and which 

 are first properly thinned out. By 

 a motion of the chp through the 

 thread, the heels are slowly dilated 

 Fig. 510.— Foures' Shoe. by degree. This shoe, however, is 



very expensive, difficult to make, and easily put out of order. 

 In all these methods of dilatation the shoe has to be made of 

 several pieces, and in this condition is found a constant cause of 

 weakness and of rapid deterioration, for which reason they are 

 not very practicable. It is not so vdth the system used by De- 

 fays, Sr., by which the shoe, besides containing the essential ele- 

 ments of the desired mechanical dilatation, is left entu'e to fulfill 

 the functions of the ordinary shoe, as well. That which charac- 

 terizes Defays' method, who had vised it in 1829, but which was 

 made known only in later years, is that the shoe itself, which, by 

 its ductihty in action, becomes the agent of the dilatation of the 

 hoof, becomes also, by its natural tenacity, the obstacle to the 

 return of the foot to its former contracted condition, when once 

 it has yielded to the outward motion which it has acquired. De- 



