but during the next decade he repaired his for- tunes in a series of visits to the United States.
His tenure of the professorship of orthopedics in Vienna had then come to an end under the age limit and his creative work lay behind him in the past. His one remaining contribution was to pop- ularize the operation of bifurcation osteotomy (1919). It was not his own idea, for Von Baeyer had already worked out its mechanical basis, and the chief credit for the more discriminating appli- cation of this procedure to different types of hip joint affection must be given to his pupil, Julius Haas, who followed him in the university chair and filled it with distinction until he was forced out by the Anschluss. Lorenz has told his own story, and it is part of the history of European orthopedics, in his autobiography written in viva- cious fashion at the age of 82 (Scribners, New York, 1936). He made of orthopedics a spectacu- lar art and his place is secure in our gallery of heroes.
pharmacist, he completed his education and in 1934 entered the 2-year medical school at the University of Missouri, in Columbia. He finished his medical education at the University of Louisville, receiving his medical degree in 1937.
His education was obtained in spite of great hard- ship.
He began his internship at the St. Louis County Hospital in 1937. After an internship and 6 months of residency training, he was called to service with the US Army Medical Corps. He had a distinguished career in the army, beginning as the chief of the station hospital in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, the 201st General Hospital in Camp Ellis, IL (later moved to outside of Paris), and the Hessing Orthopedic Hospital in Augsburg, West Germany.
After getting out of the service, Lottes re- turned to St. Louis, repeated an internship and then had his residency in orthopedic surgery under the aegis of J. Albert Key. It was while he was an intern that Lottes developed and perfected his ideas about an intramedullary nail for the tibia, working at night in the morgue of the hos- pital. The Lottes nail was one of the first major contributions to the technical development of intramedullary nailing by an American orthope- dic surgeon. Lottes practiced in St. Louis until 1982 before retiring to his home in Cape Girardeau.
In gratitude for the university that gave him the opportunity to obtain his education, Lottes, who worked in the library at night while a student, gave the University of Missouri–Columbia Medical School, one million dollars in 1985 to build a new library, which was named the J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library.
207
