Mirrored Feet

Dr. Dudley Joy Morton makes his patients walk barefooted across a black box lined with mirrors. A light fixture is rigged in the box so that pressure of the patient's feet on the soft top of the box makes bright spots on the image in the mirror; from the spots, which record the distribution of pressure, he can diagnose their foot ills. To doctors meeting last week at the Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in Atlantic City, Dr. Morton, professor of anatomy at Columbia, demonstrated his black box, explained what he had found out by studying the human foot in motion.

As an orthopedic surgeon in World War I, Dr. Morton was struck by the amount of foot trouble and the difficulty of analyzing it. After the war he spent five years as a researcher of the American Museum of Natural History, studying the evolution of the human foot, went on to investigate feet at Yale. Then with Dr. Herbert Elftman he devised his apparatus to study feet, His findings: most trouble with the foot starts with the first metatarsal, the small bone behind the great toe. Normally this bone carries two-sixths of the weight of the body. If it is short or wobbly, the second metatarsal has to take up the load. Weak ankles are usually caused by a loose-jointed metatarsal; so are heels worn down on one side. Real flat feet are rare, the result of long standing metatarsal trouble.

Dr. Morton does not like ugly corrective shoes, prefers to prop up weak feet with insoles that are thickened at the spots that need help. But the insole, says Dr. Morton, must be as carefully made as a pair of glasses. He is sure that his black box, which will be manufactured commercially soon, will be as important to orthopedists as the cardiograph is to heart specialists.

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