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Plaster cast of the Humerus of David Livingstone

The cast shows a malunited fracture of the bone. David Livingstone a renowned explorer and missionary, is remembered as the first European to have gone to the heart of Africa. He was also the first white person to see the giant waterfall on the Zambezi River, which he named the Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria. In 1844, Livingstone tracked a cattle-killing lion that had been troubling a local African village. He shot it twice with a shotgun, but the big cat ferociously attacked anyway. He later wrote that the animal ‘shook me as a terrier dog does a rat’. His left arm was badly damaged and he never regained use of it. A later injury to the same arm is believed to have left a false joint at the site of the original fracture. The established non-union enabled his friend, Dr William Fergusson, to recognise his otherwise mummified corpse when it was returned to England in 1874. The eleven soft-tissue wounds inflicted by the lion on Livingstone healed well although his companions, who were also attacked, suffered terrible infection in their wounds. Livingstone believed that his tartan jacket ‘wiped off all the virus from the teeth’, and commented ‘this point deserves the attention of enquirers’.