Fred H. Albee

Frederick Houdlette Albee (1876-1945) was an American orthopedic surgeon remembered above all for bone grafting. He grew up on a farm in Alna, Maine, where his uncle taught him tree grafting, and he later carried the same idea of joining living tissue into surgery. He studied at Bowdoin College and Harvard Medical School, interned at Massachusetts General Hospital, and became chief surgeon of the orthopedic clinic at the New York Postgraduate Medical School. In 1906 he performed a successful bone-grafting operation for a patient with a painful hip, and in 1911 he developed a spinal fusion that used bone in place of metal for infected vertebrae. His power-driven Albee Bone Mill, invented in 1912, shortened a graft operation to as little as ten minutes. Wikipedia also counts him among the fathers of rehabilitative medicine, a pioneer of physical, psychological and occupational rehabilitation.