Macroscopic evidence of healing in Civil War specimens

• Main Author: Trull-Donahue, Danielle
• Language: en_US
• Published: Boston University 2021
• Subjects: Posttraumatic injury; Bone injury; Civil War
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/43369

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University, 2011. === Unlike the process of healing, studies related to the survival time of bone after injury are lacking and a need exists for setting descriptive standards for macroscopic trauma analysis of bone. The rate of macroscopic changes that occur during bone healing can be determined by analyzing specimens that exhibit posttraumatic injury with known survival times. A total of 109 specimens were analyzed from the Civil War Collection housed at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM). All specimens displayed some form of traumatic injury, disease, or both. A macroscopic assessment of each bony element was performed using a method practiced by Barbian and Sledzik (2008), to determine the presence of four responses to trauma that occur in bone and the total number of responses per specimen. The four responses observed in this study include a line of demarcation, osteoclastic activity, osteoblastic activity, and sequestration. Each specimen was scored 1 for the presence and 0 for the absence of each type of bone response. Then the number of responses per specimen was calculated to determine a total score of all responses. Throughout this study, the evaluation of the total score of bone responses [TRUNCATED]