Spine surgery not properly described until the 1930s
I well remember the stab of pain I got last summer when I was cleaning our car. We had arrived home after an enjoyable holiday at the beach and I was about half way through washing the dirt from our family car that had taken us there and back.There must have been something about the way I bent to pick up the hose, because when I lifted it from the ground the weight was just enough to send a solid jolt of pain across a section of my backbone.I managed to finish cleaning the car by favoring the arm, and hobbled inside. Next day I was the physio’s consulting rooms. She gave me a simple set of exercise. There was no talk about spine surgery. She didn’t need anything high tech devices or even a traditional implement. Just her hands and her advice on how to use gravity to pull my back into alignment again.A few weeks later the back was 100 percent back to normal.Medical people down through the ages have probably known that exercises can fix many types of back pain. And I assume that for hundreds of years before spine surgery was an option, back pains were successfully treated with simple exercises.Yet I was still surprised to learn earlier today that it was not until 1934 that the first scientific description of herniated discs and the surgical treatment of them was published.