Delayed Autogenous Bone and Callus Transplants and Prepared Host Beds

THE LITERATURE on bone transplantation in animals is quite voluminous and contains numerous conflicting opinions.1,2,31,2,3 Chase and Herndon1found that our present-day knowledge of the histological fate of bone following transplantation is but little changed from the views presented by Auxhausen in 1907 and 1909. His fundamental principles were that periosteum has in high degree the property of survival and osteogenic activity in autografts, has markedly less in homografts, and practically none in heterografts. Most of the investigations in recent bone transplants have dealt with the relative merits of different types of donor material. There is general agreement that autogenous bone is the best graft to use because healing is more rapid; that cancellous bone is more rapidly revascularized than cortical bone; and that osteocytes, the mature elements of bone in both cortical and cancellous grafts, survive transplantation infrequently. A number of investigators have studied the effects of