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as possible; (?>) there must be no constrictive tissue; and (c) the proper application of a pressure dressing. To permanently prevent adherence and obtain freely functioning tendon, the writer reports in this article his personal experience in the use of tantalum as an interpositional substance. Various metals and alloys have been buried in the tissues of the body by surgeons for the past 3 or 4 hundred years. For a metal or an alloy to be satisfactory in the presence of tissue fluids it must be ' inert' physically and chemically. After fulfilling this basic requirement, further physical characteristics the metal or alloy should possess are ductility, malleability, that it can be ' cold-rolled' and its ability to be tempered to various degrees of hardness. It was not until 1936 that a ' metal-like' material was produced that fulfilled any of these requirements. That was vitallium,