MEMOIR ON TENOTOMY. 
583 
Of late, tenotomy has occupied the especial attention of human 
surgeons. By most of them it has been acknowledged as a remedy 
for several affections before its employment deemed incurable. In 
order, however, that the term tenotomy may be restricted to the 
division of tendons, other analagous terms have been introduced 
for the division of ligaments, aponeuroses, and muscles, such as 
syndesmotomy , aponeurotomy, myotomy. Without adopting these 
new-coined appellations, the signification of the word tenotomy 
may be qualified by certain additions to it indicative of the parts 
operated on : thus, the section of the flexor muscles of the feet 
may be denominated plantar tenotomy , single or double , and the 
section of other muscles by anti-brachial, coraco-radial, carpo -meta- 
carpal tenotomy, &c., &c., operations which have for their object 
the straightening or rectification of limbs bowed or bent, or con- 
tracted. 
Although the history of tenotomy, long since known in human 
medicine, has been traced with no less accuracy than ability by 
M. Yerheyen, a distinguished veterinary practitioner, formerly a 
teacher at the Royal School at Alfort, Professor at the Veterinary 
School of Curghen-les-Bruxelles, and titular member of the Bel- 
gian Academy of Medicine, still we consider it our duty, for the 
sake of precision, to recount, in a few words, the origin of an ope- 
ration which, in our own minds, we have all along regarded as es- 
pecially veterinary. 
It was about the year 1 598, that a senator of Bologna (Italy), 
Carlo Ruini, treated of the transverse wounds of nerves (tendons) 
of the horse, in a work he published on the diseases of that 
animal*. 
More than half a century after him, in 1666, Solleysel, a French 
gentleman, recommended in his Parfait Marechal, the cutting of 
the flexor tendons of the feet in order to let down contracted sinews 
or stilty legs: an operation which he denominated enervation — a 
name in accordance with the anatomical knowledge of his day, 
though an incorrect one with us of the present day. 
Ten years later, about 1674, a German surgeon, Roger Roon- 
huysen, resolved, with a view of rectifying an inclination of the 
head, to attempt the section of the sterno-cleido-mastoideus muscle. 
He succeeded beyond his expectations, and henceforth became 
the declared partizan of tenotomy. Soon afterwards, however, 
either from timidity or from unsuccessfulness, the surgeons to whom 
Roonhuysen had made known his method of operation neglected the 
new remedy for diseases which up to that time they had regarded 
as incurable, and so tenotomy fell into oblivion! . 
* We have made extracts from the work in this memoir. 
t An extract from the work of M. Von Ammon on the physiology of 
tenotomy. 
