What is Biomechanics?
Biomechanics is the branch of science which deals with the application of mechanical principles to the biological systems like human, animals, plants, organs and cells. The word biomechanics developed during the early 1970s, describing the application of engineering mechanics to biological and medical systems.
History
- Aristotle wrote the first book on biomechanics, De Motu Animalium, or On the Movement of Animals . He not only saw animals’ bodies as mechanical systems, but pursued questions such as the physiological difference between imagining performing an action and actually doing it.
- Leonardo da Vinci was recognized as the first true biomechanician, because he was the first to study anatomy in the context of mechanics. He analyzed muscle forces as acting along lines connecting origins and insertions and studied joint function. He also intended to mimic some animal features in his machines. For example, he studied the flight of birds in order to find means by which man could fly. Because horses were the principal source of mechanical power in that time, he studied their muscular system in order to design machines which would better benefit from the forces applied by this animal.
- In the 16th century, Descartes suggested a philosophic system whereby all living systems, including the animals and human body (but not the soul), are simply machines ruled by the same mechanical laws, an idea that did much to promote and sustain biomechanical study.
- Giovanni Alfonso Borelli embraced the idea of Descartes and studied walking, running, jumping, the flight of birds, the swimming of fish and even the piston action of the heart within a mechanical framework. He determined the position of the human center of gravity , calculated and measured inspired and expired air volumes, and showed that inspiration is muscle-driven and expiration is due to tissue elasticity. Borelli was the first to understand that the levers of the musculoskeletal system magnify motion rather than force, so that muscles must produce much larger forces than those resisting the motion. He had an intuitive understanding of static equilibrium in various joints of the human body well before Newton published the laws of motion.
- In the 19th century Étienne-Jules Marey used cinematography to scientifically investigate locomotion. He opened the field of modern ‘motion analysis’ by being the first to correlate ground reaction forces with movement. In Germany, the brothers Ernst Heinrich Weber and Wilhelm Eduard Weber hypothesized a great deal about human gait, but it was Christian Wilhelm Braune who significantly advanced the science using recent advances in engineering mechanics. During the same period, the engineering mechanics of materials began to flourish in France and Germany under the demands of the industrial revolution. This led to the rebirth of bone biomechanics when the railroad engineer Karl Culmann and the anatomist Hermann von Meyer compared the stress patterns in a human femur with those in a similarly shaped crane. Inspired by this finding Julius Wolff proposed the famous Wolff’s law of bone remodeling .
