Melvin Starkey Henderson

Melvin Starkey Henderson (1883 to 1954) was an American orthopaedic surgeon who spent his career at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Born in Saint Paul, he trained in medicine at the University of Toronto and joined the Mayo brothers as an assistant in 1907. In 1910 he proposed a separate section for orthopaedic surgery, studied under specialists in Liverpool and Edinburgh, and then organized and headed the Mayo orthopaedic section until he retired in 1948. He was noted for work on bone grafting and fractures of the neck of the femur, devised a recognized procedure for recurrent shoulder dislocation, wrote on internal derangements of the knee, and used a guide pin for inserting blind hip nails. His research on synovial chondromatosis left his name on the condition known as Henderson-Jones syndrome. He was a founder and first president of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery in 1934, and held a professorship at the University of Minnesota through the Mayo graduate programme.