Anatomy and Art

a blog by Sara Egner

Archive for the ‘hands’ tag

Rodin’s Hands at Stanford

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There is a really interesting exhibit happening at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford.  I believe it opened just yesterday, and will be there until August 3rd.  It’s called Inisde Rodin’s Hands: Art Technology and Surgery.  You can read Stanford’s coverage of it directly here.  Or you can watch this video with James Chang speaking a bit about noticing specific physical maladies in Rodin’s sculptures when he was an undergraduate, and how this project grew from that observation.  Now he incorporates the study of these sculptures into his hand surgery educational program where students diagnose and correct the maladies observed.

 

Sarah Hegmann, who I went to school with, put together this animation bringing Rodin’s hands to life as part of the exhibit.

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April 10th, 2014 at 8:24 pm

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Blocked from the O.R.

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As I sit here typing this, a very good friend of mine is currently undergoing hand surgery.  We’d actually talked about me maybe coming and taking pictures of the whole thing if her doctors were comfortable with it.  But such things really are much more easily arranged through the surgeons than they are through the patients.  So now, she’s in there with just the surgeons, which I hate, since they’re keeping her awake for this.  And I’m also missing what could be my last chance to view a hand surgery.  That may sound odd if you’re not involved in my line of work, but I had wanted and planned to see a hand surgery as part of my training in anaplastology.  Particularly for the somatic work, it made sense to get a closer look at things.  But the timing never worked out and it didn’t come to be.

Hands are such fascinating complicated pieces of anatomy.  I hate that my friend hurt hers while coming to see me in celebration of my finishing grad school no less!  But right now, I’m on the patient’s side of the equation.  And I’m trusting that she’s in good care.  And I’m hoping that someone in there is talking to her and keeping this from being a terrible experience for her. If anyone could keep good spirits about them through a thing like this though, it’s my friend, Jasmine.

She told me that they’re reducing one of her carpal bones.  It’s not a procedure I’m familiar with.

This is about as familiar as I get with the carpal bones.  And it’s been a couple of years now since I got this involved in knowing about them.  Starting from the most commonly broken big one at the base there and working around, their names are scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform (that little ball on top of triquetrum), hamate, capitate, trapezoid, and trapezium (which I keep thinking could be the one my friend is having reduced today since we’ve been calling it a broken thumb.)

But aside from their names, basic shapes, and a little bit of trivia about them, I really don’t know much about these little guys we have all jumbled up in our wrists.  I wish I was in there right now, getting the low down what they’re doing for my friend.  But I’m not.  So, like millions of friends and loved ones of patients before, and millions more to come, I can only think good wishes to her and hope for the best.

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August 10th, 2011 at 10:37 am

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Hands!

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Lately, between seeing patients at the clinic, I’ve been learning a bit about somato prostheses, specifically what goes into taking impressions of hands and fingers and building a prosthesis from there.  I’ve really only been through the impression taking process so far.  We did that with algenate, much like you would an ear or a nose.  Getting an entire hand out is difficult and takes some finagling, but I did it.  I was then able to mix up and pour yellow dental stone into the algenate impression.  Slowly I peeled away the algenate to reveal the stone cast created in the process.  I have to say that all those years of being a picky eater as a child have served me well in my recent years.  Between anatomical dissections, and delicate separations of materials for my anaplastology classes, it’s a fine trick, being able to precisely remove one thing from another.

Once all of the algenate was picked away, we made a few adjustments to the cast to clean it up and make it non-stick, and from this process, I now have my very own replica of my right hand.

Since then I’ve repeated the process for just two fingers, and I now have copies of my first two fingers of each hand, also in stone.  The next step in this bench exercise is to amputate one of the stone fingers (which as it turns out is a little bit scary to think about even though it’s just in stone).  And from there I will learn about the sculpture and silicone creation process of making a finger prosthesis.

From what I’ve read, such prostheses help people hold a pen or pencil, type, play an instrument, any number of things, as well as maintain a more normal appearance.  I look forward to working with these types of patients in the months to come.

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February 10th, 2011 at 9:22 pm

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hands

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There are truly a great many things which influence the hands.

There are 9 tendons traveling through the carpal tunnel from muscles in the forearm to allow flexion and extension of the proximal and distal interphalangeal joints.  There are short intrinsic muscles between the metacarpals which allow for abduction and aduction of the metacarpals.  There are 4 lumbricals which allow for flexion at the metacarpal phalangeal joint, as well as some hyperextension when the hand is in an already extended position. And then specialty muscles for the thumb and pinky finger that allow for flexion, extension, and opposition.  Both the ulnar and median nerves travel into the hand, as well as some superficial branches of the radial nerve.  Ulnar and radial arteries travel in as well and create arches that put off smaller arteries into the fingers.

We have all those little carpal bones, eight of them.  Scaphoid, being the one to connect with the ulna.  Scaphoid is also the most commonly broken.  Capitate, being the largest, and also so prominent by it’s central positioning.  Hammate and pisiform on the ulnar side of the hand working with trapezium to create the carpal tunnel and allow passage for all those tendons along with the median nerve.

Yup, there’s a lot happening in there.  It all seems like quite an arrangement.

Be good to your hands.  They are complicated pieces of equipment.

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September 20th, 2009 at 10:38 pm

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Technology

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Lately there has been a technological glitch between Firefox’s new Flash upgrade, and the design behind WordPress blogs which has kept me from being able to upload images here. For as much as we use technology to create the things we want, it sure does get in the way a lot too. Well I believe I just found the work around. So here is a nice big photo to celebrate…

That is actually one of my photos, as well as my hand (well the living one anyways). The bones were courtesy of UIC’s collection that gets handed out for reference among students taking Gross Anatomy.

And if any of you reading here are also bloggers and encountering difficulty uploading images to your own sites, I found the fix here…

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/217126

What they don’t tell you is that disabling the Shockwave Flash plugin will affect your browser experience in other ways.  In my case, I noticed that video goes offline when I have it disabled.  But what you can do, is disable Shockwave Flash for just the time it takes you to upload your images, and then go back and re-enable it.  Now that your files have been loaded, you can access them as you normally would.

There is little more frustrating than being blocked in our creative endeavors by technical errors and glitches.  Unfortunately, the more programs we bring into our efforts, the more common this problem becomes.  Just the trouble of our times I guess.

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August 4th, 2009 at 4:40 pm

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