Gavriil Ilizarov

Gavriil Abramovich Ilizarov (Гавриил Абрамович Илизаров; 15 June 1921 – 24 July 1992) was a Soviet physician, known for inventing the Ilizarov apparatus for lengthening limb Bones and for the method of surgery named after him, the Ilizarov surgery.

Ilizarov was born the eldest of six children to a poor Jewish family in Qusar District, Azerbaijan.

His father, Abram Ilizarov, was a Mountain Jew from Qusar.

In 1928, the family moved to the parents of his father in the town of Qusar in Azerbaijan, near Qırmızı Qəsəbə.

In 1939, he graduated from Buynaksk Medical Rabfak, an educational establishment set up to prepare workers and peasants for higher education, and he entered the Crimea Medical School in Simferopol.

After the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War in 1941, the school was evacuated to Kyzylorda in Kazakhstan.

After finishing school in 1944, Ilizarov was sent to a rural hospital in Dolgovka, a village in Kurgan Oblast in Siberia, 2000 km east of Moscow.

In 1950, he obtained a position within a General Surgery Department of the Kurgan Regional Hospital, which included a duty as a surgeon with the air ambulance.

Ilizarov's residency was carried out in orthopedic surgery, during which he developed an external fixator system in 1951.

He discovered that by carefully severing a bone without severing the periosteum around it, one could separate two halves of a bone slightly and fix them in place, and the bone would grow to fill the gap.

He also discovered that bone regrows at a fairly uniform rate across people and circumstances.

These experiments led to the design of what is known as an Ilizarov apparatus, which holds a bone so severed in place, by virtue of a framework and pins through the bone, and separates halves of the bone by a tiny amount; by repeating this over time, at the rate of the bone's regrowth, it is possible to extend a bone by a desired amount.

Originally, bicycle parts were used for the frame.

The procedure was inspired by a shaft bow harness on a horse carriage.

For long time, Ilizarov faced skepticism, resistance, and political intrigues from the medical establishment in Moscow, which tried to defame him as a quack.

The steadily increasing statistics of successful treatments of patients led to a growing fame of Ilizarov throughout the country, and he became known among patients as "the magician from Kurgan".

In 1955, he became Chief of the Department of Trauma and Orthopaedics in the Regional Hospital for War Veterans in Kurgan.

In 1968, Ilizarov defended his doctoral thesis in Perm and was awarded the title Doctor of Sciences bypassing the Candidate of Sciences degree for which the thesis had originally been prepared.

A breakthrough came in 1968, when Ilizarov successfully operated on Valeriy Brumel, the 1964 Olympic champion and a long-time world record holder in the men's high jump, who injured his right leg in a motorcycle accident.

Before coming to Ilizarov, Brumel spent about three years for unsuccessful treatments in various clinics and underwent seven invasive and 25 non-invasive surgeries.

The first foreign medical visitor was Johannes Hellinger from the former GDR, Medical Academy of Erfurt in 1970.

He made a first publication in a Western medical journal about the Ilizarov Method.

In 1971, the Kurgan Research Institute for Experimental and Clinical Orthopaedics and Traumatology (KNIIEKOT) was established in Kurgan.

In the center, the Ilizarov method of transosseous osteosynthesis is applied to lengthen or reshape limb Bones.

In 1980, Carlo Mauri, an Italian mountaineer, explorer, and photojournalist, on the urgings of his Russian colleague Yuri Senkevich, travelled to Kurgan, in the Soviet Union.

He was to be treated by Ilizarov for a tibial fracture that healed incorrectly after a skiing accident ten years earlier.

Italian doctors had long given up hope of any surgical improvement to the leg.

Ilizarov distracted the stiff non-union in his tibia by 2 cm, healing the pseudarthrosis, corrected an equinus deformity by distraction and lengthened his leg.

Mauri dubbed Ilizarov "the Michelangelo of Orthopaedics".

On his return to Italy, the healing of Mauri's leg amazed orthopaedic surgeons.

Subsequent to this, Ilizarov was invited by Antonio Bianchi-Maiocchi and Roberto Cattaneo to be a guest speaker at the AO Italy conference in 1981 in Bellagio.

He gave three lectures at the conferences to more than 200 participants from Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany.

At the end of the lectures, Ilizarov earned a ten-minute standing ovation.

Ilizarov was the head of this center until 1991.

With about 1,000 beds, 24 operating rooms, and 168 employed physicians, KNIIEKOT became the largest orthopedic clinic in the world.

After his death, KNIIEKOT was renamed the Russian Ilizarov Scientific Center for Restorative Traumatology and Orthopaedics (RISC RTO).

The staff includes ten professors, 34 Doctors of Sciences, and 193 Candidates of Sciences.

The RISC RTO comprises an out-patient clinic where 250 patients can be consulted daily, a hospital with 800 beds, an experimental department, and animal surgery.

Every year, over 9,000 people undergo treatment at the RISC RTO.

Scattered reports about the successful treatment of Brumel by Ilizarov appeared in the Western press during the Cold War era.