Humerus Varnhemiensis – A Surgical Wonder of the Past

I recently visited Varnhem Abbey Church, located in the small village of Varnhem in the heart of Sweden. And while the church itself boasts a long history dating back to the 900s, what caught my attention was this half of a humerus -that turned out to be a replica- inside a small shed on the church’s yard.

The note inside the showcase reads:

Copy of the humerus found in the cloister during the excavation of the monastery ruins in 1928. It is from a medieval man who had been injured by a sword or axe. He was then patched up by the monks using a copper plate wrapped around the entire leg. The three halves show that the plate was then fastened together with rivets or wood. The man has survived the operation because new bone tissue has formed after the procedure. This find is the only one of its kind in Sweden. The original is in the Historiska Museet in Stockholm.

And while there is nothing in Wikipedia about this find, I trucked down this post from a Swedish (?) blogger that did a bit of a digging.

In that posts he references an 1976 paper on the subject by Dan-Axel Hallbäck, a medical doctor and scholar where he points out the following:

• The humerus likely dates from the late medieval period, around 1260-1527, with a less likely range from 1150-1260. There is also a slight chance that the bone is as recent as from 1674-1695 (hence the awkward question mark in the title of the paper), when the church was used for burials of nobility, but its location in the monastery, not the church, contradicts that.
• Carbon-14 dating could not be used without unacceptable damage to the bone.
• The bone is wrapped in a “remarkably pure copper” cylinder, 7.3 cm long, and about 0.7 mm thick.
• The cylinder has three pairs of holes, where it would have been held together by rivets, or similar, now gone. When the holes are lined up, the cylinder snugly fits around the bone.
• The bone has a healed fracture (“proliferative bone reaction”), a porous area indicative of infection, and two “exostoses”, bone growths on the surface of the bone, the larger of which has begun to cover the copper sheet! There is thus overwhelming evidence that the patient survived the surgery and recovered.

The paper concludes: “My assumption is that the injury was caused by a cut from, for instance an axe or a sword, which led to an open wound, with the bared bone visible. The bone was probably not cut in two pieces. The plate was placed round the bone to bring about stabilization. At the same time, the pure copper had an antibacterial effect on the wound. Whether this effect was deliberate or not is impossible to say. Judging from the bone, and considering the well developed exostoses and the proliferative bone reaction, as well as the lack of fracture notches on the X-ray pictures, the patient must have survived for years, may be decades. Note that nothing can be said about the function of the arm after the operation”.

“The fixation of the plate so closely to the bone as in this case entails seriously damaged soft parts, and it is a true surgical exploit to carry through this operation so that the patient survived”.