Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist

The first edition of this Atlas has been out of print for several years. The generous reception which it received and the continuing demand for copies of it suggested that a second edition might be found useful.

In preparing it, we have attempted to improve the quality of the reproduction of the standard plates as well as of the other illustrations and to revise and augment the text in order to increase its usefulness to those who have occasion to consult it. All of the plates have been remade, many of them from new intermediates of the original hand-films. Four new male standards have been added, where experience has shown that too long an interval occurred between successive standards in the previous edition. The female standards remain unchanged, except for a new plate at age 3 years. In a number of instances a standard plate has been replaced by one made from a different handfilm which shows the same stage of skeletal development more clearly than did the plate which was eliminated. The same rate of skeletal development illustrated in the previous edition has, however, been maintained.

The illustrations in the section on Maturity Indicators have been redrawn and their description as well as that of the standard plates have been extensively revised, in an attempt to increase their clarity and, hence, their value to the reader. Some new, supplementary material has been appended, notably the tables devised by Bayley and Pinneau for predicting adult height from skeletal age as determined from radiographs of the hand and wrist by the use of these standards. It seemed desirable to bring these tables into convenient proximity to the standards with which they are designed to be used. We are grateful to the authors and to the Journal of Pediatrics, in which the tables were originally published, for permission to reproduce them here.

We wish to call the attention of the reader to the persons to whom our indebtedness is acknowledged in the Preface to the First Edition of this book. The years have served to increase further both the value of their many contributions to our studies and our sincere appreciation of them.

The continuing co-operation of Dr. Normand L. Hoerr, Henry Willson Payne Professor of Anatomy at Western Reserve University School of Medicine, of Dr. B. Holly Broadbent, Director of the Bolton Fund, at the same institution, and of Dr. Harold C. Stuart, Professor of Maternal and Child Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, has done much to facilitate the preparation of this volume. Their unfailing helpfulness has made pleasurable what without it would have been a rather onerous task.

Mr. David G. Shields, of the University Hospitals, Cleveland, Ohio, and Mr. Yoshio Okumoto, of the Department of Anatomy, Stanford University School of Medicine, made the photographic copies of the X-ray films from which the plates for this edition of the Atlas were prepared. The drawings for the section on Maturity Indicators were done by Mr. William H. Golden, of the Bolton Fund Laboratory at Western Reserve University School of Medicine. We are grateful to them and to Mrs. Esther Jessee, who typed the manuscript, for the patience and care with which they performed these tasks.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book, Pyle and Hoerr have brought out their Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Knee (Charles C Thomas, Springfield, Ill., 1955), and a similar volume on the Foot is now in press. Like ours, these atlases are based on the radiographs in the Brush Foundation collection at Western Reserve University School of Medicine. It is planned that eventually similar atlases of other joint areas based on films from the same collection will be published, in order to make more fully available the extensive radiographic material from Professor Todd’s study of child growth and development.

Grants from the Nutrition Foundation, Inc., the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Inc., the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and grant A-624 from the Section on Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases of the National Institutes of Health have supported various aspects of our study of skeletal development. We wish to record here our grateful acknowledgment of that help.

W. W. G.
S. I. P.