In the late 1770s or, more likely, the early 1780s, young Abraham Colles is said to have found an anatomic textbook floating in the river Nore in Kilkenny, Ireland. Apparently the river had flooded, and the local physician’s textbook had been carried away only to arrive, fortuitously, in Abraham’s hands. Abraham tried to return the book, but Dr. Butler gifted it to him, and thus was born a great physician.
In 1790 Abraham and his brother William enrolled in Trinity College in Dublin. At the same time Abraham became an apprentice at Dr Steevens’ Hospital. When he wasn’t working or studying Abraham could be found sleeping in dark corners of the hospital, perhaps not unlike medical students today who snooze where they can. Once he had finished his degree in Dublin, Abraham moved to Edinburgh where he trained as a graduate student at what was perhaps the best medical school of the time. He graduated from Edinburgh in 1797. From there, stories tell us that he walked to London, a journey of 10 to 14 days.
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While I have never walked from one place to another for 14 entire days, I have walked every day but one for 2029 days in a row. I started walking daily during the pandemic. A friend suggested a challenge to walk every day from Victoria Day to Labour Day, in part to combat the malaise of those pandemic days. From Labour Day we pushed to Thanksgiving then Christmas and soon our goal became a year of daily walking. After a year, seeing no reason to stop, we continued. And so it went. I walked after work and sometimes in the neighbourhoods around work if I had to stay late. I walked while travelling and while on vacation. I walked through good weather, but also through rain and, in the middle of Canadian winters, through snow and even ice. Walking, in many ways, became part of who I am.
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After his walk to London, Abraham Colles worked on dissections with the well-known doctor, Astley Cooper. From there, he returned to Dublin and was elected as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was a practicing doctor and beloved professor who published three books and over a dozen surgical papers.
As a physician, Dr. Colles was particularly devoted to the importance of dissection. He wanted to show his students “the connection between anatomical structures of each part and the surgical diseases and operations to which it is subject.” To this end, he was known to dissect for up to two hours a day and he kept careful records of what he found.
There’s a lot more to his career, of course, but what’s interesting to me is that all of this careful observation led to Dr Colles’ name being given to a particular fascia, a ligament, and a fracture. In 1814, decades before x-rays came into use, Dr. Colles published a paper about the characteristic “dinner fork” formation of the fracture and showed ways to treat it. Colles fractures usually occur after a person falls onto an outstretched hand*. We often call a Colles fracture a broken wrist, but it is truly a break at the end of the radius bone near the wrist. They are among the most common fractures seen in emergency rooms.
A “fall onto an outstretched hand” is so common that it’s known in Emergency Rooms by the acronym FOOSH. I find this acronym particularly apt as it imitates the sound that happens when you fall. In a way this is an onomatopoeic acronym that causes a fracture which is, itself, an eponym. This is oddly satisfying.
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I missed one day of walking during those 2029 days because I was truly sick. While my streak had ended, I felt better the next day, so I went out and started walking again. I’d gotten used to it. My daily walks had given me new awareness of the things around me. I now noticed changing flowers and leaves, the way the ice froze in different patterns in the winter, and how the world changed day by day. Somehow observing made me feel more connected to the world and to myself.
But on Sunday morning, my observations of ice and my connection to the world didn’t prevent me from slipping and falling on a patch of ice hidden under the snow. FOOSH! I went down hard, and even though I’m fully an adult, I cried when I landed. After a few minutes, a woman who had been standing across the street wandered over, cigarette in hand, and asked, “you okay?” I very clearly was not.
She seemed vaguely sympathetic but disinclined to help, so I pulled myself up using my left hand on the stop sign next to me. I limped back to my house, tears still in my eyes, holding my right hand against my chest. There, I realized that for the first time in some years, I was home alone: My spouse and older child were visiting universities; my youngest was out with friends. I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t badly injured, but I didn’t need to have years of dissection work under my belt to know that my hand did not look normal. I called an ambulance.
The paramedics were as gentle as possible. Given the prevalence of this sort of break, they must have seen it a hundred times before, so I think they knew. When I finally talked to a doctor, he told me that not only did I break my wrist, I “super broke” my wrist: the X-ray at the hospital revealed that I had sustained the fracture that Abraham Colles identified well over 100 years ago.
The good news is that, while I will need surgery and then have a cast for six weeks, I should heal well. The bad news is that it hurts. And, while I have taken advantage of this injury to show my creative writing students how to write an essay in the style of John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed I have had to dictate the whole thing and have learned that I do not like dictating essays.
I am impressed with Abraham Colles work and grateful to the medical professionals who are treating me. Nevertheless, I give the Colles fracture one star.
Persistence and Pedagogy 