The Roman physician Galen (129-200 AD) is the first scientist known to have written about the concept of the mammalian back, describing it as a vaulted roof sustained by four pillars, the limbs (cited by Slijper 1946). The next concept dates from themiddle of the 19th century. It depicts the back as a bridge where the limbs are represented by the land abutments of the bridge and the gap between these is spanned by the bridge itself (Bergmann 1847; Zschokke 1892; Kruger 1939). The bridge (Fig 1) consists of an upper ledger, representative of the supraspinous ligament, a lower ledger representing the vertebral bodies, and a number of smaller girders, pointing in either craniodorsal or caudodorsal direction, between them, which represent the spinous processes and the interspinous ligaments.
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