For years in doing amputations I have felt the need of some sort of efficient retractor to take the place of the two-tailed or three-tailed cloth retractor commonly used. The cloth sometimes holds the soft parts away from the saw, but frequently does not, the consequence being that the muscles are shredded or bruised enough to cause sloughing, or, on the other hand, the bone is not sawed off high enough the first time.
No instrument catalogue that I know of shows an amputation retractor of any sort, and the surgeons I meet have not heard of such a device, so, as far as I know, I have the only pair of amputation retractors in existence. At first I used two kidney-shaped pieces of sheet copper cut out by hand. By overlapping these around the bone and bending them a little at the periphery to keep one's fingers away from