Ignacio Ponseti

Ignacio Ponseti (also Ignasi Ponseti i Vives, born June 3, 1914 in Ciutadella, Menorca, Spain, † 18 October 2009) was an orthopedic surgeon who has developed in the 1950s, the Ponseti method for the non- surgical treatment of congenital clubfoot. Born Spaniards fled from the Spanish Civil War and became a faculty member and a practicing physician at the University of Iowa.

Biography

Ponseti studied medicine at the University of Barcelona. Shortly after graduation, the Spanish Civil War between the Republican government of Spain and the rebels broke out under General Francisco Franco. Ponseti served as a medical officer on the side of the Loyalists as a lieutenant and later as captain and worked in the field of orthopedics and fractures. At the time, took advantage of Ponseti the services of smugglers to provide injured soldiers to France. Soon after, he fled to France itself and from there to Mexico, where he worked as a general practitioner two years. There he helped a doctor friend in 1941 to travel to Iowa and to study orthopedics under Arthur Steindler. 1944 Ponseti received an unrestricted residence permit and became a member of the Orthopaedic Department at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

Early in his career in Iowa Ponseti realized that the results of surgical clubfoot treatments were not very good - the patient then had only limited movement. He began to develop a treatment that took advantage of the flexibility of the ligaments of babies. The new treatment method was initially received with some skepticism, in the last 50 years but has been used by many physicians and healthcare providers, as in the UK and Turkey.

Works

• Ignacio Ponseti: Congenital Clubfoot: Fundamentals of Treatment. Oxford University Press, Oxford, Oxfordshire 1996, ISBN 0-19-262765-1.