Ignacio Ponseti

Ignacio Ponseti (1914 to 2009), also known as Ignasi Ponsetí i Vives, was a Spanish-American physician specialising in orthopedics. Born on Menorca, he studied medicine at Barcelona University and served as a medical officer with the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, where setting fractures set him on a career in orthopedics. He escaped to France, practised family medicine in Mexico for two years and reached the University of Iowa in 1941 to study under Arthur Steindler, completing his residency in 1944 and joining the faculty. In the 1950s he developed the Ponseti method, a non-surgical treatment of congenital clubfoot using a series of casts followed by an abduction brace, which grew from a view that surgery did not fully correct the defect. Over some fifty years it was adopted by most clinicians worldwide, and he kept seeing patients and training visiting doctors well into his nineties.