there is a sheath of connective tissue that covers the back of the hand and into the back of the fingers which limits independent flexion of the fingers, mainly the Ring and Little fingers (4th and 5th) at the first metacarpo-phalangeal joint or 'knuckle'I tried to find a diagram online but failed ! Charles
-----Original Message----- From: Herbert Ward [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 18 December 2007 17:36 To: lute@cs.dartmouth.edu Subject: [LUTE] Diagram of tendons. Sometimes I hear that the ring finger shares tendons with its neighbors, so that no level of technique can achieve perfect indepdence of fingers. I've never seen a good diagram showing exactly how this works. For example, I don't know whether the sharing occurs for the flexor tendons, the extensor tendons, both, or neither. Indeed, there must be more than two tendons per finger, because the fingers can move sideways also. I spent about 15 minutes Googling the subject, but the drawings were not useful, because they did not resolve the spaghetti-like nature of the overall mechanism (tendons, sheaths, pulleys, hoods, joints, etc). Does anyone know of a schematic-type drawing, which shows the mechanical relationships clearly, at the expense of realistic pictorial depiction? To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
