III.—The Fingers of Pterodactyls

Webbed fingers.

W ebbing of the digits, or syndactyly, is not caused by the fingers sticking together in the womb; rather, it is caused by failure, during the sixth to eighth weeks of intrauterine life, of the usual longitudinal interdigital necrosis that normally separates the fingers. This " webbing " is the most common abnormality of the newborn hand. It happens either as an isolated anomaly or as part of a...

Treatment of Infected Fingers

THE numnber of spells of certified incapacity due to cellulitis and abscesses of fingers was 6 per cent. of the total from all causes in 1953-4 (Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, 1953-4). Despite the fact that gross infections requiring radical treatment are now rarely seen, this figure prompts constant vigilance for advances in treatment. This paper reviews the treatment of infectio...

Ulnar deviation of the fingers.

Ulnar deviation of the fingers at their metacarpophalangeal joints is perhaps the most characteristic deformity of rheumatoid arthritis. Nineteenth-century clinicians, among others Garrod (1859) and Charcot (1881), were impressed by its occurrence in chronic arthritis, but no views on the development of the deformity were recorded. The current opinion, that it results from gravity, is open to o...

Familial osteoarthropathy of the fingers.

Crystalline Saffman-Taylor Fingers

We study the existence and structure of steady-state ngers in two-dimensional solidiication, when the surface energy has a crystalline anisotropy so that the energy-minimizing Wull shape and hence the solid-liquid interface are polygons, and in the one-sided quasi-static limit so that the diiusion eld satisses Laplace's equation in the liquid. In a channel of nite width, this problem is the cry...