Lorenz BÖHLER1885–1973

Lorenz BÖHLER

1885–1973

Lorenz Böhler was born and raised in the Vorarl- berg region of Austria, travelling to Vienna in 1905 to begin studying medicine. He was granted his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1911. In 1914 he came to the United States, where he spent several months visiting the Mayo Clinic. Böhler was very much impressed by the organizational structure of the clinic. There is no question that he later incorporated into his own hospital organization, concepts that he had seen in action in Rochester. During World War I, he served in several army hospitals and organized and directed a hospital that specialized in the treatment of fractures and joint injuries. He received many awards for his work as a military surgeon. After the war, he held several positions as the chief of surgery in provincial hospitals.

By 1925, Böhler had convinced a group of insurance companies dealing with patients receiv- ing workman’s compensation, that by organizing the care of workers with industrial injuries under his aegis, he could improve the results and reduce costs. This led to the formation of the Unfal- lkrankenhaus (Accident Hospital) in Vienna in 1925. Böhler served as director of this hospital from its founding until his retirement in 1963.

He oversaw every facet of the delivery of medical care in his hospital and organized the treatment of injured patients to the last detail. He kept meticulous and detailed records of every case and performed thorough follow-up examina- tion of patients after they left the hospital. It was

simple: if the patient did not keep his follow-up appointment, his workman’s compensation was cut off. These data furnished the material on which he based his major books on the treatment of fractures, which were translated into all the major foreign languages. As a result, Böhler became the greatest authority on the treatment of fractures in the first half of the twentieth century.

Böhler allowed no deviations from his step-by- step procedures. He was open to new ideas and innovations, but tested them carefully before he adopted them. The greatest value of his work today lies in the well-documented long-term results of treatment in hundreds of cases and many varieties of fractures.

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Who’s Who in Orthopedics

Harold Ray BOHLMAN

1893–1979

Harold Ray Bohlman was a native of Gauge

County, Nebraska and a graduate of the 1923

class of Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he

eventually became a clinical professor of surgery

(orthopedics). He was one of the pioneer investi-

gators of the use of metal implants and antibiotic

therapy for the treatment of bone infections. In

1937, after Charles Venable and Walter Stuck

introduced the use of Vitallium into orthopedic

surgery, Bohlman designed a Vitallium replace-

ment for the femoral head and inserted it in the

hip joint of seven patients with nonhealing

femoral neck fractures. Venable’s and Stuck’s

experiments with Vitallium had been performed