Abstract
Every reader of this journal will be all too familiar with Colles' fracture; either seeing patients with it in A &E, helping with its reduction and splinting or being part of the anaesthetics team involved in its management. On an icy winter's day there might be half a dozen patients with this injury in your accident unit, mostly elderly ladies. Yet it was not until 1814 that Abraham Colles accurately described this injury and its treatment in his paper ‘On the fracture of the carpal extremity of the radius', published in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal of that year.
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