Who’s Who in Orthopedics
in the United States; he was its chief surgeon from 1938 to 1943, and was on its board for many more years. During the war years, from 1942 to 1945, he was Surgeon-in-Chief of the Alfred I.
duPont Institute of the Nemours Foundation in Wilmington, Delaware, and from 1946 to 1958, he was an active member of the Medical Advi- sory Board of this Institute.
Bruce Gill was always interested in the care of the crippled child; he held state clinics in central Pennsylvania during the whole of his active pro- fessional career. He was Chairman of a Joint Committee on Crippled Children of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, the American Orthopedic Association, and the American Medi- cal Association from 1942 until 1952. From 1942 to 1950 this committee was called the Com- mittee for the Study of the Public Care of the Indigent Orthopedic Cripple and then, from 1951 to 1952, the Committee on the Public Care of Crippled Children. He was a member of the Advi- sory Committee on Crippled Children to the Federal Children’s Bureau for many years. He was at one time Chairman of the Committee on Legislation and Medical Economics of the Amer- ican Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and of the Committee on the Treatment of Infantile Paraly- sis of the American Orthopedic Association.
Bruce was always interested in education and research: he was Chairman of the American Orthopedic Association’s Committee on Under- graduate Education for many years. In 1948, under his chairmanship, a very successful sym- posium on undergraduate education was held at the Joint Meeting of the British, Canadian, and American Orthopedic Associations in Quebec.
Bruce was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha and Sigma Xi honorary fraternities. He was an honorary member of the Ambrose Paré Society of France, of the Pennsylvania Orthopedic Society, and of the Orange County (Florida) Orthopedic Society. He was a member of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery, the oldest surgical society in the United States, the Philadelphia Orthopedic Club, of which he was a president, an active fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadel- phia, and a member of the International Society of Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology, as well as many other scientific societies.
Bruce was not a prolific writer, but whatever he wrote was extremely clear and well prepared.
There are 69 publications listed under his name in the Index Medicus and Quarterly Cumulative
Index from 1912 to 1949. Sixteen of these publi- 114Arthur Bruce GILL
1876–1965
Arthur Bruce Gill was born of Scotch ancestry on December 12, 1876, in western Pennsylvania, at Greensburg. He received his BA degree in 1896 at Muskingum College in Ohio, from which college, 42 years later, he received an honorary Doctor of Science degree. He received his MD degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1905.
He interned at the Presbyterian hospital in Philadelphia, with which institution he was asso- ciated for 47 years, for many years as Chief of the Orthopedic Service. The well-known surgeon, Dr.
Ashley P.C. Ashurst, of the Episcopal Hospital in Philadelphia, first talked to Bruce about going into orthopedics, but it was Dr. Gwilym G. Davis who convinced him he should be an orthopedic surgeon rather than a general surgeon. In 1920, he succeeded Dr. Davis as the third Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at the University of Pennsyl- vania, which position he held until 1942. He was on the staff of the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hos- pital from 1908 until it merged with the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania in 1941. In 1911, he became an assistant surgeon at the Widener Memorial Industrial School for Crippled Children in Philadelphia, which had been founded by Dr.
DeForest Willard, the University of Pennsylva-
nia’s first Professor of Orthopedic Surgery. In
1920, Bruce became its chief surgeon, a position
that he held until the school closed in 1942. For
a long period of years he was on the staff of
the Children’s Seashore House at Atlantic City,
the oldest crippled children’s convalescent home
cations are related to congenital dislocation of the hip; six to coxa plana and other conditions of the hip; six to the hand; four to cerebral palsy; four to poliomyelitis; four to the foot; and 29 to other subjects.
The name of Gill is attached to six original sur- gical procedures: an operation for Dupuytren’s contracture in the hand (1919); a check ligament operation for a paralytic genu recurvatum (1931);
a fusion of the shoulder (1931); a posterior bone block operation of the ankle for foot drop (1933);
a plastic reconstruction of the acetabulum (shelf operation) (1935); and a wrist fusion (1947).
Bruce is credited with being the first in the United States to have performed and reported on the results of Stoeffel neurectomies for spastic paral- ysis (1918). One of his best publications, “The Kenny Concepts and Treatment of Infantile Paral- ysis,” written in 1944, was an answer to many of Sister Kenny’s misleading statements and unwarranted conclusions on the treatment of poliomyelitis. This article was a classic and its preparation gave him great satisfaction.
Bruce was extremely well known for his work on congenital dislocation of the hip, and was con- sidered by many to be one of the foremost author- ities on this subject in the United States. He believed firmly that every dislocated hip that had a shallow acetabulum after reduction should have a shelf operation—not only to give stability during the growing period, but also to decrease the possibility of osteoarthritis in later life. He also advocated a shelf procedure for the large femoral head, not well seated in the acetabulum, that often accompanies a coxa plana. For the par- alytic hip dislocation, he frequently advocated fusion.
Although Bruce made many outstanding con- tributions to surgical procedures in orthopedics, he fully appreciated the nonoperative aspects of the specialty. He wrote that our “specialty was founded in the spirit of conservatism.” In his Pres- idential Address to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in 1938, he spoke of using a knife only as a last resort and asked the ques- tion, “Are too many operations performed in the practice of orthopedic surgery?” Since the skill- ful use of the knife has become a distinguishing talent and criterion of the great surgeon, he said that there has been a growing tendency to neglect, to delegate to persons who are not members of the medical profession, and even to discard, in time, all arts of surgery but the use of instruments and mechanical apparatus. He spoke of there being a
spirit of unrest in the specialty and a tendency for the rapid adoption of newer methods that prom- ised much but had not yet stood the test of time.
He mentioned that there was a tendency to neglect the study of the fundamentals of surgery and to place “our sole reliance on methods and fads and gadgets.”
In his Presidential Address before the American Orthopedic Association, in 1944, he expressed concern over the trend at that time toward an increase in the government control of the practice of medicine; he spoke of greater paternalism in Washington, leading to totalitari- anism, and mentioned concentration of too much power in the hands of the chief executive. He proposed several significant questions, such as whether extension of government control would improve medical services, whether this improve- ment could be accomplished by other agencies, whether it is consistent with our form of govern- ment, and whether this is conducive or detrimen- tal to the welfare of the nation.
Bruce was always an enthusiastic golfer and bridge player. He was a charter member and pres- ident of the Doctors’ Golf Club of Philadelphia and also a charter member and president of the Inter-hospital Bridge Club. Bruce was one of the organizers of the Golfing Players of the American Orthopedic Association, which for many years was responsible for the Association’s golf tourna- ments. In addition to golf and bridge, his hobbies were swimming, chess, classical music (which he often played on the piano), the writing of poetry, and in his later years, lawn bowling.
In 1936, Bruce married Mabel Halsey Woodrow, a wonderful and talented person, who could not have been a more devoted and under- standing wife. They had no children. In 1953, he retired from active practice in Philadelphia, and in 1955 went to Mt. Dora, Florida, to live. Here, in a small but most comfortable and attractive home in Florida’s lake region and citrus belt, Bruce passed the last 10 years of his life. After he went to Florida, most of his summers were spent in the North Carolina Mountains outside of Asheville. It was here he was taken with his last illness, a severe heart attack, and died on Novem- ber 7, 1965. A great orthopedic surgeon had passed on.
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