Who’s Who in Orthopedics pedic Surgery for 8 years and president of that
organization from 1955 to 1956, twice president of the Chicago Orthopedic Society, secretary of the American Orthopedic Association for the 1957 and 1958 meetings, president of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons from 1959 to 1960, president of the Chicago Medical Society from 1964 to 1965 and trustee from 1971 to 1976, and a delegate to the Illinois State Medical Society and the American Medical Asso- ciation House of Delegates. In 1980, he received the Chicago Medical Society Public Service Award and in 1981, the Sheen Award, consisting of a plaque and $15,000, from the American Medical Association. He was a founder of the Orthopedic Research and Education Foundation in 1956 and served as its first secretary–treasurer.
He modestly said that Al Shands, president, delivered the Foundation while he just held the retractors.
During the spring, summer, and fall, he played golf regularly, and he was quite good at it. Pho- tography was another hobby, and, as expected, the results were above average.
On April 19, 1934, he married Ruth Robinson, a delightful woman who never forgot a face or name and impressed all residents who passed through his program. This lovely lady helped immeasurably in editing her husband’s writings and in supporting his very active career. Their son, David, is a professor of English literature at Amherst College, and their daughter, Julie Tholander, lives in Billerica, Massachusetts.
Harold Sofield was an exceptional person who used his talents well. He helped others immea- surably, took great pleasure in doing so, and was appreciated by many people. Having worked with him as a resident, an associate, and a partner, I can truly vouch that here was a great man who left an indelible mark on thousands of lives. It had been his custom to invite all of his past and present residents and their spouses to his home on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. How fitting it was that he should pass on at that very hour, on New Year’s Eve of 1987.
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Edgar William SOMERVILLE
1913–1996
Edgar Somerville, who retired from surgical prac- tice at the Nuffield Orthopedic Centre, Oxford, in October 1977, died on March 9, 1996. He was an outstanding figure of the generation that devel- oped pediatric orthopedic surgery in the UK in the postwar years. The son of a general practitioner, he was educated at Shrewsbury School, at Cambridge University and then at St. George’s Hospital, London. He qualified in 1938 and, after house appointments at St. George’s, joined the Royal Air Force as a medical officer, serving at home and in the Middle East. He was demobilized in 1946 as a wing commander and after 2 years at the orthopedic hospital at Oswestry he was appointed consultant surgeon at what was then the Wingfield Morris Hospital in Oxford. In the auto- cratic manner of those days, his appointment was made without an interview by the hospital’s founder, Mr. G.R. Girdlestone.
Somerville first made his name as coauthor
with Girdlestone of the second edition of the book
Tuberculosis of Bones and Joints (1952) and for
the next 30 years he was always at the forefront
of British orthopedics. He gradually became a
specialist in the treatment of children’s deformi-
ties, but never gave up his interests in other
aspects of surgery. His most famous contributions
were the papers he wrote about the pathology and
treatment of congenital dislocation of the hip. He
was one of the first to advocate a direct surgical
approach, stressing the role of the inverted
limbus in preventing concentric reduction. The
“Somerville” method, which he taught to sur- geons from all over the world, was a logical sequence of procedures in which a period of trac- tion on a Wing field frame was followed by con- trast arthrography of the hip and excision of the limbus if it was inverted. The leg was then immo- bilized in a plaster spica in full internal rotation for a month, when a derotation osteotomy was performed. His method contrasted with the long periods of splinting, and the uncertain outcome, of the “conservative” methods often used at that time.
The children whom he treated were never dis- charged from his care, most being examined per- sonally once a year in Oxford at clinics that soon became study sessions on skeletal development.
Miniaturized radiographs, meticulously mounted on a large cardboard sheet, told the story of each child’s hip. Like frames from a slow-motion cin- ematograph, the yearly films were used to teach the importance of the fourth dimension in pedi- atric surgery. To maintain these records, patients were relentlessly pursued; the international network of Somerville’s trainees made escape, even by emigration, almost impossible. The unique archive that resulted is maintained to this day, and mothers who were themselves treated by him in infancy now bring their own babies to the clinics.
Somerville also wrote on congenital coxa vara and was among the first to practice osteotomy for Perthes’ disease. He also introduced the concept of “persistent fetal alignment” of the hip in a short paper in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, which is a good example of the clarity of his thinking and of his writing. All his ideas were brought together in the book Development of the Hip in Childhood, which he wrote in retirement in 1981.
Somerville had studied scoliotic deformity of the spine even before he went to Oxford, and this was the subject of one of his most penetrating insights. His theory that it resulted from lordosis, which led to rotation, was ignored for nearly 40 years, but was resurrected in the 1980s, when methods of treatment based upon it were suc- cessfully applied.
His reputation as a teacher was international, and during the last 20 years of his professional life he traveled the world as a lecturer and visit- ing professor, to more than 30 countries. His real enthusiasm, however, was for those places where he could actually do something, rather than just talk about it. He played a leading part in organiz-
ing the first orthopedic service in the Sudan and visited Khartoum regularly to supervise it. In 1964, with assistance from Barbara Castle’s Ministry of Overseas Development, he set up an orthopedic service and training program in Burma and visited Rangoon regularly, even after his retirement. At home, he was editorial secretary and then vice president of the British Orthopedic Association and was sometime president of the orthopedic section of the Royal Society of Medi- cine, the British Orthopedic Research Society and the ABC Orthopedic Club.
Edgar Somerville’s recreations were pursued just as energetically and with no less success. He had university Blues for hockey and tennis and played golf to a handicap of six. In the 1960s he took up sailing and cruised the coasts from Copenhagen to southern Brittany.
The years of his retirement were busy with travel and golf, but his joy in sailing receded after the death of his wife Margaret in 1981. He is sur- vived by his daughter and by his two grandsons, whose sporting efforts he applauded from the touch-line to within a few weeks of his death.
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