The Human Foot

The appendages at the end of our forelimbs tend to attract the evolutionary and clinical limelight, but our feet are as important as our hands for our survival and success as a species. We tend to take them for granted, yet the many millions of modern humans who run either competitively or for recreation, or who play sports such as soccer, tennis, and badminton, or who ride, or dance, or swim, or climb, or who stand and walk as part of their work, all depend on their feet. We submit them to unreasonable loads, and expect them to survive our pounding them on hard pavements. We also add insult to injury by squeezing them into fashionable but uncomfortable footwear which does not conform to the shape of the foot. All this means that many professionals make their living caring for our feet. Worldwide many hundreds of thousands of professional people spend most of their working life looking after the foot. They include orthopaedic surgeons, rheumatologists, diabetologists, orthotists and prosthetists, physical therapists, and podiatrists of whom there are at least 15,000 in the United States of America alone. In the English language there are two classic books about the foot, both by anatomists. In 1935 the American anatomist Dudley Morton wrote the first e- tion of The Human Foot, and in Great Britain Frederick Wood Jones’ seminal book, Structure and Function as Seen in the Foot, was published in 1944.