IN ANY large Army hospital, one sees traumatic injuries among soldiers not unlike those occurring in civil life. Owing to the total mechanization of our present day war machine, these injuries are usually much severer than those encountered among civilians. However, we have recently treated a group of patients who sustained severely fractured elbows in automobile accidents, and these injuries are exactly the same as those all too frequently seen among civilians. In view of this similarity of injuries occurring among both soldiers and civilians, we should like to call to the attention of the medical profession the so-called sideswipe fracture—a fracture fraught with complications, a fracture most difficult to treat and a fracture prone to produce a poor result.
The term "sideswipe" is applicable to this mutilating fracture of the left elbow, since it denotes the manner in which the fracture is sustained. The driver of an automobile has