Maurice Edmond Müller

Maurice Edmond Müller (1918 to 2009) was a Swiss orthopedic surgeon, born in Biel, who was instrumental in developing internal fixation of bone fractures and who advanced hip prostheses. He studied medicine at Neuchâtel, Bern and Lausanne and took his doctorate at Zürich in 1946. Two patients in 1944 turned his attention to the field, one whose fracture had been fixed with an implanted nail by Gerhard Küntscher, the other with a hip implant made in Paris. He worked in Ethiopia and several Swiss hospitals, led orthopedics at St. Gallen from 1960, and from 1963 to 1980 was professor at the University of Bern and head of orthopedic surgery at the Inselspital. In 1958 he co-founded the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Osteosynthesefragen, the AO group, and developed tools and implants for fracture fixation. In 1967 he founded Protek AG to market his hip prostheses. SICOT named him Orthopedic Surgeon of the Century in 2002, and he also funded the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.