Joseph Babinski (1857-1932), a French neurologist of Polish descent, was the first person to describe extension of the big toe following stimulation of the sole of the foot on 22 February 1896 (Babinski, 1896). He referred to the sign as 'phénomène des orteils' (toes phenomenon) but it is now usually referred to eponymously as the 'Babinski sign' or descriptively as the extensor plantar response.

A 68-year-old man with a history of ulcer disease and mild renal insuffi ciency comes to your offi ce complaining of severe pain in his right foot. You note swelling and redness around the base of the big toe and diagnose acute gout. Wishing to avoid nonsteroidal anti-infl ammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and colchicine because of the patient’s medical history, you wonder what you can safely prescribe f...

Thumb reconstruction requires accurate functional and esthetic approximation to the original. Accepted methods generally have some deficiencies, particularly in appearance, and frequently the secondary morbidity is unacceptable. A method of thumb reconstruction with the use of an iliac crest bone graft and a free neurovascular "wrap-around" flap from the big toe is described that combines the a...

In this paper we compare the expressiveness of the Task Oriented Programming iTask approach of specifying interactive GUI applications with ObjectIO and Racket big-bang . ObjectIO is representative for the large class of traditional desktop widget based toolkits aiming to provide the programmer with full access the underlying GUI toolkit in a functional style. In contrast, the Racket big-bang a...

Subungual exostosis is a benign calcifying projection that occurs on the distal phalanx beneath or beside the nail. The problems in treatment are frequent postoperative recurrence and nail deformity or loss. Here, we describe the case of a male patient with a subungual exostosis beneath the proximal region of the nail plate of the right big toe. A precise preoperative evaluation of the anatomic...

The authors report the case of a 34-year old patient with large botryomycoma of the big toe developed on an ingrown nail. The patient underwent surgical resection of the tumor and curative treatment of the ingrown nail. This tumor was considered exceptional due to its size: 2cm diameter, whose nature was confirmed by anatomopathologic study. The patient was scheduled for follow-up visits on a r...

This paper describes a system for measuring the temporal parameters of hemiplegic gait. This system uses shoe insoles with sensors, acting as switches, placed under the heel, head of the first metatarsal, head of the fifth metatarsal and the big toe. This system is able to monitor gait for up to 10 min and can be used by the patient over any surface. Parameters for evaluating hemiplegic gait ar...

A medical physicist in the United States, Cho Zang-Hee, who pioneered the proton emission tomography (pet) scanner, had his curiosity aroused 6 years ago, when he injured his back and found almost instant relief with acupuncture treatment. So he started carrying out experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) on the usual human guinea-pigs -volunteer medical students. He flash...