Archer¿s elbow, the Tudor¿s RSI: How the very modern injury has been around for almost 500 years

RSS Feed

Archer¿s elbow, the Tudor¿s RSI: How the very modern injury has been around for almost 500 years

March 3rd, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

By
Dalya Alberge

Last updated at 1:24 AM on 3rd March 2012

Life was tough for most people in Henry VIII’s Britain, with disease, war and religious conflict raging.

So it may come as a surprise to hear that a common complaint at the time was repetitive strain injury.

Five centuries before the computer or the modern office, men were struggling with an epidemic of achy shoulders and bad backs.

Feeling the strain: Archery was a popular sport during the reign of Henry VIII

The condition has been traced by sports scientists at Swansea University who have examined preserved skeletons on board Henry’s stricken warship the Mary Rose which sank in 1545 and is now preserved in Plymouth dockyard.

And the reason for their ailments was the craze for archery which was practised in towns and villages up and down the country. The king was a talented archer in his younger days and made a weekly practice compulsory for every male aged between 7 and 60 years.

Bows and arrows were not just a leisure activity but crucial to Britain’s security, as guns were relatively new and not very accurate.

Royal demand: Henry loved archery so much he made the sport compulsory for every male over the age of seven

Professional archers could fire 12 arrows a minute – each one the equivalent of pulling weights of up to 200lbs (or about 90kg), the weight of a well-built man.

While experts noticed that the
skeletons had evidence of strain to their bones back in the 1980s when
the shipwreck was raised, new computer models have been able to show
exactly which muscles were strained and the impact on their bodies and
posture.

Nowadays an Olympic archers would only
pull around 48lbs (22kg) and the sport is rare. However repetitive
strain injury is on the rise in modern times. A 2008 study found that
more than two thirds of workers now suffer from it costing £300million
in lost working hours.

Taking time off work was probably not
an option on board the Mary Rose, the great warship launched in 1511 and
served in several wars against France. It would have carried the head
of the royal fleet, the Lord High Admiral, and a crew of hundreds of
sailors, soldiers and gunners.

So far 92 complete skeletons have been recovered from the wreckage along with a treasure trove of medieval weaponry from the ship which was raised from the seabed in 1982.

The toll of repetitive strain injury
has emerged has come out of an 18-month study by scientists, surgeons
and engineers at Swansea in collaboration with the Mary Rose Trust which
runs the ship site.

They used a laser scanner to create
three-dimensional images of pairs of radium bones – those between the
wrist and elbow – from 23 skeletons allowing them to measure the bones
and virtually slice them into cross-sections.

Body of evidence: Researchers made the discovery by studying preserved skeletons found on the Tudor warship Mary Rose

Remarkably it showed the elbow joint of the bow-pulling arm could be up to 48 per cent bigger than the joint on the other arm. The team will soon be doing x-rays on the bones and expect to see a higher density as well.

Nick Owen, Sport and Exercise Bio-mechanist (corr) from the College of Engineering at Swansea said: ‘What we did for the first time was to treat these archers like elite athletes, which is what we specialise in, and analysed their technique just like a modern athlete.

‘It was a unique opportunity to study activity-related changes in human skeletons, as they had spent a lifetime training and building up immense strength. One of the skeletons had terrible osteo-arthritis on the elbow of his bow arm that you would never see today.’

They are also scanning the skulls to enable facial reconstructions of an archer, as well as a carpenter, master gunner, officer and gentleman – bringing them all to life.

Alex Hildred, Curator of Ordnance at the Mary Rose Trust, said: ‘Longbows were an important feature of Henry VIII’s reign. Being able to quantify the stresses and their effect on the skeleton may enable us at last to isolate an elite group of professional archers from the ship.’