02/02/2010
Pé Torto Congínito
Biography
Known for the method for the clubfoot treatment that bears his name, Ignacio Ponseti was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
Born 3 June 1914 in Menorca, part of the Balearic Islands, Spain, Ponseti was the son of a watchmaker and helped repair watches. The skill was said to eventually contribute to his abilities as an orthopedist.[1]
Ponseti studied medicine at Barcelona University. Not long after he graduated, fighting broke out between Francisco Franco Bahamonde’s forces and the Spanish Loyalist army—the start of the Spanish Civil War. Ponseti served as a medical officer with the Loyalists as a lieutenant, then captain, in the Orthopaedic and Fracture Service. His duties included setting fractures, which put him on a career in orthopaedics. Without ambulances, Ponseti used the help of local smugglers to take the injured into France.[1] He soon escaped to France himself and went to Mexico, where for two years he practiced family medicine. A physician there helped Ponseti get to Iowa in 1941 to study orthopaedics under Arthur Steindler, M.D. Ponseti completed a residency at Iowa in 1944 and became a member of the orthopaedic faculty at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
Early in his career at Iowa, Ponseti saw that the outcomes of clubfoot surgical treatments were not very good—patients had limited movement. He set out to develop a treatment that made the most of babies' flexible ligaments.[2] The method was met with some opposition but over the past 50 years it has been adopted by many doctors and other health care providers worldwide, including in Britain [3] and Turkey [4]
Well into his nineties, Ponseti continued to see patients and trained visiting doctors from around the world. He also developed new prosthetic devices with John Mitchell of MD Orthotics [1] and produced training and information DVD's on the method.
Ponseti's other research focused on congenital and developmental bone and joint disorders, skeletal growth disorders in children, and the biochemistry of cartilage. He gained insight in the early 1950s on the effect of amino nitriles on collagen cross linking, defined the curvature patterns of idiopathic scoliosis, and demonstrated that curves progressed after skeletal maturity. He also conducted many studies evaluating the long-range results of treatments for congenital dislocation of the hip, clubfoot and scoliosis.
