Franklin Adin Simmonds

Franklin Adin Simmonds (1910 to 1983), known as Sam Simmonds, was a British orthopaedic surgeon whose name survives in the Simmonds test, a simple clinical test for rupture of the Achilles tendon that he developed in 1956 and 1957 and that is still widely used. Educated at Sherborne School, Pembroke College, Cambridge, and St Thomas's Hospital in London, he worked from 1939 at St Nicholas's Hospital in Pyrford under W. Rowley Bristow, who later recruited him into the Royal Army Medical Corps. As a lieutenant colonel he commanded base hospitals in North Africa, Sicily, France and the Far East. After the war he returned to Pyrford and worked there and at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford until he retired in 1975. He also worked with the pioneering surgeon John Charnley on hip replacement surgery and became an expert in that field. He disliked his given names and was universally known as Sam.