Henry Feffer

Henry Leon Feffer (1918-2011) was an American neurosurgeon who practised as a spinal surgeon in Washington, D.C. and lived in Bethesda, Maryland. Born in New York City on 15 January 1918, he graduated from Indiana University and from the Indiana University School of Medicine, and he served an orthopedic surgery internship at Gallinger Municipal Hospital in Washington, which later became District of Columbia General Hospital. In the mid-1950s he was among the first physicians to test systematically whether low-back pain could be relieved by epidural injections of hydrocortisone, a treatment that physicians now routinely offer before turning to more invasive surgery. He worked as a spinal surgeon in the capital for more than four decades, counted Saddam Hussein among his patients, and became an emeritus professor at George Washington University Medical School. He died on 9 May 2011, aged 93, of congestive heart failure.