The clinical features of the disease called Dupuytren’s “contraction of the palmar fascia” were well known before the true seat of the morbid process was surmised; but the Greek and Arab writers, and their European followers down to the end of the last century, make no reference to it. The first accessible descriptions are those of Sir Astley Cooper in his “Treatise on Fractures and Dislocations” published in 1822, and of Boyer in the eleventh and last volume of his “Maladies Chirurgicales,” issued in 1826. The latter is really a very correct account from the clinical aspect; and although the author could suggest no better pathological explanation than that implied by the name “crispatura tendinum,” which he found already given to the disease by previous writers, in works that cannot now be traced, he accepts it with commendable hesitation.[1] Sir Astley Cooper, on the other hand, supplies a less detailed description, but recognises the non-tendinous origin of the disease. The classical essay, however, was that of Dupuytren (1831), which, partly from its intrinsic merits and partly from the fame of the writer, attracted wide attention, and called forth within the next few years a number of eminently scientific observations upon the pathology of the complaint. More recently the affection has received close attention from many distinguished surgeons in France, Germany, America, and England. _Symptomatology._—Before entering into the symptomatology, I ought to premise that there are to be distinguished two forms of the so-called contraction of the palmar fascia: one in which the condition occurs independently of any definite traumatism and tends to multiplicity of lesion, the other appearing as a result of an ordinary wound, and confined to the parts in direct relation to the injury. The first of these I propose to speak of as true Dupuytren’s contraction, the second as traumatic contraction. The characteristics of the latter will be referred to later.