436 SURGICAL APPLIED ANATOMY. [Chap. xix. 



The fascia lata completely invests the limb, 

 being, so far as the front of the thigh is concerned, 

 attached above to Poupart's ligament, to the body and 

 ramus of the pubes, and the ramus of the ischium. 

 Its integrity is interrupted only by the saphenous 

 opening. This fascia exercises some influence upon 

 deep abscesses and deep growths. Thus a psoas 

 abscess reaches the thigh by following the substance 

 of the psoas muscle, and finds itself, when it arrives at 

 Scarpa's triangle, under the fascia lata. In a great 

 number of cases it points where the psoas muscle 

 ends, but in other and less frequent instances its 

 progress is decidedly influenced by the fascia lata, and 

 it moves down the limb. Thus guided, a psoas 

 abscess has pointed low down in the thigh, and even 

 at the knee, and Erichsen reports a case where such 

 an abscess (commencing, as it did, in the dorsal spine), 

 was ultimately opened by the side of the tendo 

 Achillis. 



The ilio-psoas muscle being stretched, as it were, 

 over the front of the hip joint, and participating in 

 many of the movements of that joint, is peculiarly 

 liable to be sprained in violent exercises. Between 

 this muscle and the thinnest part of the hip capsule is 

 a bursa, which often communicates with the joint. 

 When chronically inflamed, this bursa may form a large 

 tumour on the front of the thigh that may, accord- 

 ing to Kancrede, attain the size of a child's head. To 

 relieve this bursa from pressure when inflamed, the 

 thigh always becomes flexed, and a train of symptoms 

 is produced that are not unlike those of hip disease. 

 The bursa is quite close to the pelvic bones, and in one 

 case at least suppuration of this bursa led to necrosis 

 of those bones (Nancrede). The sartorius is a muscle 

 that, from its length, peculiar action, etc., one 

 would hardly expect to find ruptiired from violence, 

 yet in the Musee Dupuytren there is a specimen of such 



