The Secret to Walking Like an Egyptian

You may be different, but I don’t tend to think of orthopedic devices when I think of ancient Egypt. But guess what? German pathologists, writing in the British journal the Lancet, say they’ve found an Egyptian mummy (dating from 1550-700 BC) of a woman age 50 to 55 who had a prosthetic toe.

A nice, realistically carved wooden one, in fact--painted brown and snugly attached to the foot with the help of two small wooden plates and seven leather laces.

This isn’t the only kind of prosthetic device that’s been found with mummies: sundry prosthetic limbs and teeth, even a prosthetic nose, have also been unearthed. In those cases, though, it’s thought that the fake body parts were added at the time of burial so the dead person wouldn’t show up at the afterlife incomplete.

But the prosthetic toe displays signs of wear and tear on its lower surface, so the scientists think it was used during the woman’s life.

And since there was flesh grown all over the site where the toe was once attached, the researchers also speculate that the woman had the toe surgically removed while she was alive.

I admit it: My first thought was, “It’s only a toe. Why did anyone bother making a fake one?” Tsk. Such ignorance.

In fact, the big toe bears 40% of a person’s walking weight, write the authors. I learned more from Linda Wobeskya, a Cambridge, Mass.-based physical therapist who knows a lot about foot problems.

The joint between the big toe and the next bone down provides much of the push-off we use to walk, she says. Someone without a big toe on one foot won’t be able to push off as well and thus won’t be able to swing the opposite leg very far. They’ll limp, in other words.

The desire to have pleasing-looking feet might also have compelled the woman to seek a prosthetic toe, though not everyone appreciates how big a factor this can be. (Wobeskya once got to chatting with an engineer who was designing a prosthetic wheel that amputees would fasten onto the end of their legs and whiz about on. She gently suggested he’d been in the lab too long.)

“People are really surprisingly interested in what their feet look like,” she says. “I’ve had many patients who could care less about their strength and flexibility but cared a great deal that they got a black shoe and not a blue one.

“And they want two feet at the end of their pants legs.”

A Stain on Diagnostic Science

I consider it an incredible coincidence that only a few days ago I was talking about getting a Rorschach inkblot test to probe the dark, inner workings of my psyche. Then--the very next day--I discovered that the American Psychological Society had just published a 40-page article largely debunking the technique.

Rorschach tests, as you no doubt know, involve looking at cards covered with splatters of ink, responding with statements like “That looks like my boss squashing a beetle,” then nervously eyeing the psychiatrist or psychologist to see if they check the “insane” box. (Or something like that.)

The test is still widely used in the United States, write the authors of the article, which was published in the APS journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. (You can access it via the APS Web Site, https://www.psychologicalscience.org.) In a 1995 survey, for instance, 82% of the clinical psychologists who answered said they use Rorschach tests at least “occasionally” in psychological testing and 43% used it “frequently” or “always.”

And yet, write psychologist Scott Lilienfeld and coauthors, the Rorschach test isn’t a reliable tool for unearthing mental disturbances, even though it’s been revamped since the 1920s in a way that was supposed to make it more scientific.

A few of the scores seem to be useful, the authors write, but most are not. In fact, in studies, disturbingly high numbers of people from normal populations were classified as mentally disturbed in some way with the Rorschach test.

Maybe patients aren’t the only ones with rich imaginations.

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If you have an idea for a topic, write or e-mail Rosie Mestel at L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., LA, CA 90012, rosie.mestel@latimes.com.