Medicine: Bone for Bone

Monstrous holes in the skull and other bones are now being mended with a sort of bone sawdust obtained from the patient himself. Toronto's Lieut. Colonel Stuart Douglas Gordon, 43, who developed the method, has even managed "rebuilding [of] the better part of a soldier's skull, including a completely new eye-socket and cheekbone." The material which Colonel Gordon uses, called cancellous bone, is the spongy substance found between hard bone and marrow. The body's biggest storehouse of it is the hip bone. In its new site, cancellous bone becomes hard and fixed within a month.

Colonel Gordon, who thinks cancellous bone may...

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