Anthony F. DePalma

Anthony F. DePalma was an American orthopedic surgeon and professor, born in Philadelphia in 1904 to Italian immigrant parents and living to the age of one hundred. He received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in 1929, trained at Philadelphia General Hospital and the New Jersey Orthopedic Hospital, and was board certified in 1939. During the Second World War he served in the US Navy, including as chief orthopedic surgeon on the hospital ship USS Rixey, and left as a commander. He then joined the orthopedic department at Jefferson, became its chair and the third James Edwards Professor of Orthopedic Surgery in 1950, and later founded the orthopedic department of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He wrote more than seventy papers and five textbooks, including Surgery of the Shoulder and Diseases of the Knee, and created the journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, serving as its first editor-in-chief from 1953 to 1966. He taught abroad in the Dominican Republic, Japan and South Vietnam. He was the father of the filmmaker Brian De Palma.