A long journey to be anatomic

Excerpt

In 1836, Weber and Weber from Göttingen, Germany performed dissection studies and described the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) as two separate bundles that tension at different knee flexion angles [21, 33]. Many years later in 1912, the first ACL reconstruction was performed by Giertz, the mentor of Palmer, using a single-bundle of tensor fascia lata [5]. In 1917, Hey-Groves used an open ACL reconstruction technique that was “quite” anatomic [9]. He used tunnels to locate the graft, drilling the femoral tunnel inside-out, aiming to place the tunnel aperture on the outer aspect of the notch to produce an oblique graft. In 1938, Palmer proposed the idea of double-bundle reconstruction in his thesis on the ACL [20], though the concept received little attention at the time and his work was not appropriately accredited until many years later. …