Rovsing’s sign in appendicitis an example for the effect of erroneous translation on medical teaching (536.10)

Objective: To investigate whether Rovsing’s sign in the diagnosis of appendicitis is described and applied inaccurately in current literature, scientific papers and books, quantify the problem and investigate the cause of this error. Background: The way Rovsing’s sign is elicited is not described uniformly throughout the literature. Methods: A Pubmed search was conducted and 1069 individual studies were searched for the use of Rovsing’s sign. 53 studies were included in this study, of these 14 described the way the sign was executed. Additionally 3 current English (text)books on surgery, 3 German (text)books on surgery and 2 German books on anatomy were analyzed. The descriptions in studies and books were compared to the original publication by Niels Thorkild Rovsing in 1907. Results: No included study which described the way Rovsing’s sign is elicited gave a correct description. Of the 3 English (text)books on surgery none described it accurately, of the 5 German (text)books all yielded a correct descrip...