Ignacio Ponseti

Ignacio Ponseti (3 June 1914 – 18 October 2009) was a Spanish physician, specializing in orthopedics. He was born on 3 June 1914 in Menorca, part of the Balearic Islands, Spain, Ponseti was the son of a watchmaker and helped repair watches. The skill was said to eventually contribute to his abilities as an orthopedist. He fled Spain during the Spanish Civil War and became a faculty member and practicing physician at the University of Iowa.

In the 1950s Ignacio Ponseti developed the Ponseti Method (also known as the Ponseti Technique), its a non-surgical technique that uses a series of casts, followed by an abduction brace, to correct congenital clubfoot. The condition causes a baby's feet to turn inward and downward; if not corrected, a child is unable to walk or move properly. He was known for this method of clubfoot treatment that bears his name and was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

Ponseti studied medicine at Barcelona University. Not long after he graduated, fighting broke out between the Nationalists and the Republicans - the start of the Spanish Civil War. Ponseti served as a medical officer with the Loyalists as a lieutenant, then captain, in the Orthopaedic and Fracture Service. His duties included setting fractures, which put him on a career in orthopaedics. Without ambulances, Ponseti used the help of local smugglers to take the injured into France. He soon escaped to France himself and went to Mexico, where for two years he practiced family medicine. A physician there helped Ponseti get to Iowa in 1941 to study orthopaedics under Arthur Steindler, M.D. Ponseti completed a residency at Iowa in 1944 and became a member of the orthopaedic faculty at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

Early in his career at Iowa, Ponseti saw that the outcomes of clubfoot surgical treatments were not very good—patients had limited movement. He set out to develop a treatment that made the most of babies' flexible ligaments. The method was met with some opposition but over the past 50 years it has been adopted by many doctors and other health care providers worldwide, including in Britain and Turkey

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