ArtiFacts: Gerhard Küntscher's Marrow Nail (original) (raw)

During the first half of the 20th century, surgeons generally treated fractures with external splints, plaster casts, or by painstakingly assembling the bone fragments at surgery, and holding them together with screws, plates, or wires. But at the Surgical Congress in Berlin, Germany in 1940, German surgeon Gerhard Küntscher (1900-1972) proposed inserting a stainless steel, hollow rod into the intramedullary cavity to stabilize the damaged limb (Fig. ​(Fig.1),1), an approach he based on his preliminary results while experimenting with animals [1, 5, 6]. The attendees of the congress soundly dismissed and ridiculed Küntscher and his surgical concept [1, 4, 6], suggesting he stood as an outsider among the German surgeons inside the Nazi regime [7]. While his German colleagues rejected the technique, one surgeon attending the conference, Lorenz Böhler (1885-1973) managed to smuggle an example of the nail back into his native Vienna [1, 4, 6], a dangerous endeavor considering the heavy restrictions Germany placed on information flow in times of war [4]. Böhler performed the technique in Vienna, where it eventually was accepted; it later spread throughout Nazi-annexed and neutral Europe [2].