hospital for joint diseases 1905 2005 - new york...

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EXCELLENCE 1

Hospital for Joint Diseases

1905 — 2005

2 HOSPITAL FOR JOINT DISEASES

The Hospital for Joint Diseases came into existence shortly after the turn of the Twen-tieth Century, at a time when advances in

technology, medicine, and social-political thought were on the verge of transforming every aspect of society. The years leading up to and including 1905 witnessed extraordinary events, including the first heavier-than-air flight and the publica-tion of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. In

medicine, the recent discovery of x-rays by Wil-helm Roentgen (1845-1923) was in the process of revolutionizing diagnostic medicine. Orthopaedics was poised to emerge from general practice into a medical and surgical specialty.

New York was spilling over with the frenetic en-ergy of waves of newly arriving immigrants. The family of the founders of the Hospital for Joint Dis-eases, the brothers Henry and Herman Frauenthal,

had arrived from Germany a half-century before, in 1849, settling in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Henry and Herman were the sons of Samuel and Henrietta Lowenstein Frauenthal. Like their father Samuel, a shoemaker, they strived to become part of the fabric of a country as it invented itself.

The brothers Frauenthal both attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Henry joined the football team and took a degree in ana-lytical chemistry in 1886, while Herman majored in electrical engineering and graduated two years later. Henry went on to attend Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City, graduating in 1890. In June of that same year he became assis-tant to Lewis Albert Sayre, MD, New York’s most prominent orthopaedic surgeon and Bellevue’s Chairman of Orthopaedics—in fact, the first Chair-man and Professor of Orthopaedics in the United States. Henry remained at Sayre’s side for 11 years and later worked as well with Reginald Hall Sayre, MD, who succeeded his father as Chair. Herman Frauenthal followed his brother to Bellevue’s med-ical school and graduated in 1897.

In 1891, Herman married a socially prominent New Yorker, Minnie Rothschild (1874-1933), who later dedicated herself to guiding the Hospital’s Ladie’s Auxiliary. Minnie Rothschild’s older broth-er, Louis F. Rothschild, founder of the Wall Street

Preamble: Before the Beginning

S. Frauenthal, Boots & Shoes—the store owned and operated by Henry and Herman’s father Samuel in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Hospital for Joint Diseases, 1905–2005: One Hundred Years of Excellence was prepared by Baynon McDowell, William S. Green, and Joseph D. Zuckerman, MD

with the assistance of Frank J. Martucci, Elliot Friedman, and Hugh M. Nachamie.

Several of the photos are from Hospital Annual Reports. In addition, the Hospital for Joint Diseases expresses its appreciation to the follow-ing for images: Abilities, Inc., Albertson, NY; Avery Architecture Collection, Columbia University; Ehrman Medical Library Archives; New York Uni-versity School of Medicine; the Frauenthal family; Henry J. Mankin, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital; Howard D. Dorfman, MD, Montefio-re Medical Center; March of Dimes, New York, NY; New York Academy of Medicine Library, Rare Book Collections, New York, NY; Phillip Gowan; Sotheby’s, New York, NY; Special Collections, Lehigh University Libraries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Waldorf-Astoria Archives, New York, NY.


brokerage firm of L. F. Rothschild, would become the Hospital for Joint Diseases’ first Treasurer, remaining in that position until his death.

Henry Frauenthal had new ideas about orthopaedics and about the type of new orthopaedic hospital that was needed, ideas that he had formulat-ed during his assistantship with Lewis Sayre and during his many visits to hospitals around the city, and in 1904 he established an orthopaedic clinic at 588 Lexington Avenue and 50th Street. (Members of the Frauenthal family today recollect that the clinic was a Rothschild home, remodeled as a dispensary.) The clinic could be considered a “feasibility study” for the Hospital-to-be.

Hospital for Joint Diseases founder Herman C. Frauenthal, MD. Photo circa 1900.

Hospital for Joint Diseases founder Henry Frauenthal, MD. Photo circa 1895.

1905 ~1930On October 18, 1905, a charter was granted

by the New York State Board of Charities to the Jewish Hospital for Deformities and

Joint Diseases. Two months later, at the offices of the Frauenthals’ private practice on Lexington Av-enue at 61st Street, the Hospital’s Directors—as Board of Trustees members were called—elected as their President Emanuel M. Gattle (1858-1933), the owner of a large Fifth Avenue jewelry store.

Henry W. Frauenthal, AC, MD was to be Physi-cian- and Surgeon-in-Chief; he was also a Director. Herman C. Frauenthal, EE, MD was to share du-ties with his brother as Chief of Clinic and was also Director of Visiting Orthopaedic Surgeons and of the Electrical Department. Among the Hospital’s first advisors and consulting staff were Reginald Sayre, MD, Professor and Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, and Abraham Jacobi, MD, who came to be heralded as the “Father of Pediatrics” in America and was also known as the “foster father” of the Hospital.

On November 4, 1906, the new Hospital opened its doors in a remodeled three-story brownstone at 1917 Madison Avenue between 123rd and 124th Streets across from Mount Morris Park in Har-lem. The building had been purchased for $18,500 and remodeled to accommodate seven beds.

The Hospital’s original mission was to treat and conduct research in acute and chronic joint condi-tions in children and adults, with an emphasis on new types of treatment. The decision to accept chronic patients into the wards was innovative and

diverged from the general hospital practice of the day.

Within six months, the building next door to the north, 1919 Madison Avenue, was added to the Hospital. By then the Hospital’s name had been slightly altered—something that would hap-pen several times over the next century—to the Hospital for Deformities and Joint Diseases. By year’s end, the Hospital’s Dispensary (outpatient clinic) had treated over 1,200 patients and pro-vided approximately 9,500 treatments. One of its first Attending Orthopaedic Surgeons was Harry Finkelstein, MD (famous for the Finkelstein test in de Quervain’s tenosynovitis). Finkelstein was

Lehigh University football team, 1884. Henry Frauenthal is seated at the far left.

The first building of the new Hospital for Deformities and Joint Diseases, 1917 Madison Avenue in Harlem.

Harry Finkelstein, MD (for whom the Finkelstein test is named), eminent surgeon and one of the Hospital’s first Attendings.

6 HOSPITAL FOR JOINT DISEASES ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EXCELLENCE 7

a prolific contributor to the orthopaedic literature and, along with the Hospital’s E. J. Haboush, lat-er invented a stabilizing apparatus and operative technique for bone lengthening (1932), anticipat-ing by decades the current widely utilized Ilizarov technique of bone lengthening.

During its first years, the Hospital’s laboratory operations were assisted by a cooperative rela-tionship with the new Rockefeller Laboratories. In President Gattle’s first Report to the Board, he acknowledged the “friendly notices of the press” regarding the Hospital’s successful debut and de-scribed the work of the fledgling Hospital as “the greatest of all charities, to help the crippled poor.”

The Ladies Auxiliary was organized within two weeks of the Hospital’s opening and had its own Board. Herman’s wife Minnie Frauenthal assumed the office of President in 1912 and remained its guiding force until her death. The Ladies Auxiliary performed fundraising activities (bazaars, opera

ticket auctions, and the like), visited patients to bring them cheer and comfort (like the “candy stripers” of a later era), and fashioned all the Hos-pital’s surgical dressings.

In the summer of 1908, internal alterations to 1917-1919 Madison Avenue ncreased the capac-ity of the Hospital to 40 beds. Patients of all ages

were arriving, or being carried, to the Hospital in large numbers. The Hospital had well-established treatment plans for all patients, and its staff ex-uded a positive energy.

In 1910, the building to the south, 1915 Madi-son Avenue, was also added to the Hospital. The high brownstone stoops were removed, two long

balconies were added to the first two levels, and a fire-retardant material was applied to the floor. Capacity increased to 60 inpatients. An operating room equipped for modern aseptic surgery now occupied the top floor of 1917 Madi-son Avenue.

On November 4, 1913, a cornerstone was laid for a modern new Dispensary. According to Oliver H. Bartine, Admin-istrator of the Hospital (1924-1929), the

The Frauenthal Family

Three generations of the Frauenthal family. From left to right: Herman, Jr., Herman, Sr., and Samuel. Photo circa 1914.

The Frauenthal family, central to the founding and early years of the Hospital for Joint Dis-eases, have in fact been involved in its oper-

ations and activities throughout its history. When Henry W. Frauenthal (1862-1927) and Herman C. Frauenthal (1866-1942) founded the Hospital in 1905, they assumed its chief medical duties. Her-man’s children, Marian and Herman, Jr., continued the tradition: Herman C. Frauenthal, Jr., a financial analyst and broker, served as a Trustee from 1940 until his death in 1976, 29 of those years as Board Secretary. Herman Jr.’s sons are Trustees today: Stephen C. Frauenthal has served for 34 years and James C. Frauenthal, PhD for 29 years; each has also served as Board Secretary. Marian Frauenthal Sloane, MD (1904-1940), Herman, Jr.’s older sister,

graduated from Smith College (1926) and New York University School of Medicine (1930), served her residency at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, and became an attending orthopaedic surgeon there as the first woman in New York State licensed in orthopaedic surgery. She was also a Fellow of the American Medical Association and a recipient of the Henry W. Frauenthal Travel Scholarship (1933-1934), studying in Europe. Marian and her hus-band, David Sloane, MD (who had also completed a Hospital residency), shared a surgical practice before her untimely death at age 35. Their elder daughter Hermine Patricia Sloane (1934-2001) wrote a memoir of the Frauenthal family that is

the source of much of this information. Their younger daughter, Elaine Sloane Roemer, was an important pediatric patient: at 4 years of age, she became seriously ill with spinal meningitis and was successfully treated with sulfur.

Minnie Rothschild Frauenthal, wife of Herman and Presi-dent of the Ladies Auxiliary from 1912 until her death in 1933. Photo circa 1925.

Marian Frauenthal Sloane, Herman Frauen-thal’s daughter, the first female orthopaedic surgeon licensed to practice in New York State. Photo circa 1935.

Assembly room for dispensary patients. Photo circa 1908. Children’s ward. Photo circa 1910.

Balconies added to the Hospital building in 1910.


1914 Dispensary was the largest of its kind in the country and included long-awaited pathology, bacteriology, and chemistry laboratories, ensuring that every type of focal infection could be investi-gated.

The Dispensary offered spacious accommoda-tions for treatment areas, laboratories, and surgi-cal suites:

1. The first floor had an assembly-type waiting room, a drug department and rooms for apply-ing plaster splints and jackets:

2. The second floor contained examination rooms;

3. The third floor had rooms for treatments of massage and electricity for polio;

4. The fourth floor was for Zander treatments (passive mechanical motion) for stiffened joints and feet and “bakers” for chronic joints;

5. The fifth floor contained rooms with mirrored walls for exercises devoted to muscle educa-tion for spinal curvature, paralysis, and other conditions; and

6. The top floor contained the new suite of labora-tories as well as the X-ray Department, plaster room, anesthetizing room, sterilizing room, and a large amphitheater operating room.

While the new Dispensary served to relieve outpatient congestion, within a year the Board re-alized that a larger, safer space was needed. In addition to the problem of mounting numbers of

patients, the Hospital was being heated by fur-naces in a series of internally connected brown-stone buildings that were not fireproofed—a po-tentially catastrophic situation. Only recently the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire had killed over a hundred young women, mostly im-migrants working in sweatshop conditions. (The Hospital successfully treated one young victim for paralysis caused by a fall when she attempted to escape the flames and smoke.)

Plans were made in 1915 to raise funds to con-struct a new hospital in a completely modern, fireproof building. The Hospital for Joint Diseases was continuing a tradition of reinventing itself ev-ery several years out of discontent with their cir-cumstances and a desire to improve them.

Not long after the new Dispensary was opened (1914), the adjacent brownstone addresses of 121, 123, and 125 Madison Avenue to the north were purchased, remodeled, and internally opened to the Hospital, increasing bed capacity to 105. The remaining buildings, south to 123rd Street, facing Madison, were purchased soon after, as “place-holders” to ensure the property for the planned new Hospital building.

• • •

In 1916, one of the worst polio epidemics of the twentieth century struck New York City; nationwide 9,000 children and adults died and 27,000 survived to suffer a wide range of post-polio disabilities. The Hospital, in addition to treating victims, was active in both public and academic education. A full-page article appeared in the New York Times

on the Hospital’s efforts, “After-Treatment of the Child Paralysis Victim,” with pictures of classes, descriptions of techniques, and advice regarding care. On February 18, 1917, Henry Frauenthal, along with G. Wilson, MD, and H. Emerson, MD, published a survey on infantile paralysis under the auspices of the County Medical Society in the New York Academy of Medicine’s newsletter. Lat-er that year, Henry Frauenthal, speaking at a public forum at Public School 132 in Washington Heights, offered preventive advice, issued grave warnings lest parents delay bringing children or themselves to a hospital, and advised everyone to keep their homes clear of flies and mosquitoes.

In 1917, the Hospital’s first President Emanuel Gattle was succeeded by Lewis Straus, an associ-ate of Louis Rothschild’s brokerage firm. The same year, the Hospital became a charter member of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Only five New York hospitals at the time were charter recipi-ents: Mount Sinai Hospital, Montefiore Hospital for Chronic Diseases, Beth Israel Hospital, Leba-non Hospital, and the Hospital for Joint Diseases; eventually the Federation would grow to include 91 members.

Several new departments were added to the Hospital and Dispensary between 1915 and 1919 in order to expand services. The departments re-flected new and future focuses of research and clinical staff: (1) care for undernourished and ema-ciated children observed during the 1916 polio epidemic, including parent education; (2) fractures of long bones and those specifically involving joints; (3) care and investigation of osteomyelitis

The profusion of children afflicted with in-fantile paralysis in New York City placed great demands on the Hospital’s re-

sources. Henry Frauenthal’s first report as Phy-sician- and Surgeon-in-Chief reflect his concern and his commitment to the Hospital’s closely directed treatments, which included (1) mas-sage and passive movement; (2) galvanic and faradic electricity treatments with sinusoidal and high-frequency currents for muscular atro-phy; (3) children over three years saw a teacher of Physical Culture, for mind-body exercises to improve brain functions, terminal nerve sup-ply, and increase muscular strength; and (4) breathing exercises to address diaphragmatic paralysis.

While the overwhelming majority of polio patients received nonoperative treatment, be-tween 1907 and 1908 the hospital performed 120 surgeries, such as, tendon lengthenings/shortenings, muscle and tendon transfers for joint stiffening, nerve transfers, and nerve grafting.

The Hospital’s treatments were described in Annual Reports and in a 1914 publication, A Manual of Infantile Paralysis, by Henry W. Frauenthal and Jacolyn Van Vliet Manning. The book was a compendium of all that was known

Coping with polio and its victims

Top: Mothers bringing children to the Hospital for massage for infantile paralysis. Above: “Masseus-es for infantile paralysis; Monday, Wednesday, Fri-day.” Both photos circa 1907.

about polio treatment at the time and included the Hospital’s experience with 3,000 cases. It received worldwide attention and was consid-ered a classic of infantile paralysis literature.

Board of Health warning sign to be affixed to the front door.

The expanded Hospital, which by 1910 included the numbers 1915, 1917, and 1919 Madison Avenue.


following infected injuries of bone; (4) examining the relationship between endocrine disturbances and joint conditions; and (5) creation of a series of departments associated with controlling focal infections (gynecological, genitourinary, nose and throat, eye lesions, skin lesions). Special mention was made of laboratory efforts to elucidate the mysterious condition “obliterating endarteritis.” An entire ward was dedicated to patients with this condition.

The clinical classification of Dispensary cases in 1919 was more equitably distributed over 48 di-agnoses, with one fairly large placeholder for “not classified.” The average stay in the Hospital was 38 days.

The World War I years (1914-1918), which spanned the 1916 polio epidemic, strained the

Hospital’s resources to their limits; 25% of the ac-tive staff, both physicians and nurses, were called up to active military service. In addition, the feder-al government requested Hospital staff to instruct army surgeons in bedside and outpatient ortho-paedic care. The Dispensary, particularly, with its large numbers of presenting cases, was ideal for training in the principles and construction of ortho-paedic appliances. A Red Cross unit met at the Hospital regularly, knitting over 2,000 garments for soldiers overseas.

• • •

The end of 1919 was marked by a celebration of a successful drive to raise $1,800,000 for the new Hospital building; it also doubled as an 83rd birth-day dinner for Bellevue Orthopaedics Chairman Dr. Abraham Jacobi. There was a rousing beefsteak

dinner on December 2 at Reisenweber’s Hawaiian Room on Columbus Circle, which was normally frequented by celebrities and featured New York’s best entertainment. (Whether this inspired the in-famous Beefsteak Dinner tradition among Hospi-tal attendings and residents at the Copacabana, St. Regis, the Players Club, can only be speculat-ed.) The dinner raised $112,000, most of it through the generosity of the Directors. No fewer than five Guggenheim brothers (Daniel, Murray, Sol, Isaac, and Simon) each donated $10,000.

• • •

The Hospital was now famous worldwide, and was soon to leave behind its old-world appear-ance and embrace everything modern. To find out exactly how to realize this “modernity,” Henry Frauenthal in July 1921 traveled abroad to visit

hospitals in England, France, and Italy, where he absorbed new ideas in hospital design and meth-ods of treatment for joint diseases. The Hospital’s name was also streamlined: on November 14, 1921, it became officially, more simply, the Hospi-tal for Joint Diseases.

Plans for the new Hospital adopted a unique premise for its interior: it was to resemble a hotel, a concept now almost taken for granted in hos-

From patient to teacher, entrepreneur, and humanitarian

The new Hospital had a growing reputation for successfully treating children with difficult cases of de-

formity. In the spring of 1913, the Hospital admitted and successfully treated one of its most challenging patients, Henry Vis-cardi, Jr., who suffered from phocomelia and was born without legs. He received multiple innovative surgeries to fashion stumps capable of bearing weight to be covered with prosthetic boots. Viscardi went on to become Assistant Professor of Clinical Rehabilitation, in the New York Uni-versity School of Medicine and be pivotal in the movement for full employment rights for handicapped Americans. He became a friend and colleague of both Dr. Howard A. Rusk, founder of the Rusk Institute of Reha-bilitation Medicine, and Dr. Mathew H. Lee, Howard A. Rusk Professor and Chairman. Viscardi founded and Abilities, Inc., the first

U.S. business staffed by handicapped per-sons (primarily disabled World War II vet-erans) performing factory assembly work. Abilities, Inc. won contracts from defense industry giants and evolved by adding voca-tional training, job placement, and a school for children K through 12 and established the Human Resources Center, later the Na-tional Center for Disability Services. Viscardi was awarded 24 honorary degrees and was consultant to several presidents. In a 1996 interview, Dr. Henry Viscardi said of his life and his first “home” on Madison Avenue across from Mount Morris Park, “I believe that the Hospital was the beginning of it all.” Mathew H. Lee, MD, said, in a recent interview, “Dr. Rusk and Dr. Viscardi wrote a chapter in history that is not only of ben-efit to the United States, but throughout the world.”

Henry Viscardi, Jr. (second from left), with (far left) Mathew Lee, MD, Director of NYU’s Rusk Institute, and their wives Lucile Viscar-di and Mary Lou Lee. Photo mid-1990s.

Operating theater. Photo circa 1914. The Hospital’s “Pathological and Bacteriological Lab-oratory.” Photo circa 1914. “Chiropody Department for the Re-

moval of Callouses, Corns, Bunions, Ingrown Toe Nails, Etc.” Photo circa 1915.

“Surgeon-in-Chief. Dr. Henry W. Frauenthal and House Staff.” Photo mid-1920s.

Henry Frauenthal performing a clubfoot operation. Photo early 1920s.


pital design. The master plan included a fireproof eight-story building with a steel framework and brick exterior, 350 beds, and 100 private patient rooms plus an ambulance service. Guastavino & Son, Co., the architects, specialized in fireproof construction. Their signature arch construction graced the second floor balconies that banded the new Hospital (similar arch-and-vault designs, with herringbone-tiled ceilings, can also be seen in Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall).

The new Hospital promised to be one of a kind, the best equipped orthopaedic hospital—perhaps the best equipped hospital of any kind—in the world. On every floor were ingenious features to facilitate patient care and physician and nurse con-

venience: a basement with kitchen, pharmacy, hy-drotherapy, modern laundry, fire fighting apparatus, and building maintenance facilities; a lobby with information desks, safety deposit boxes, cashier, telephone operator, reception rooms, ward patient examining rooms coupled with physician space, a private elevator for private patients to rooms and treatment areas; second and third floors with child and adult wards, separated by gender, centrally placed kitchens, dining and play rooms, bay win-dows and balconies; fourth and fifth floors with larger private rooms, sun porches, and cheerful furnishings; a sixth floor with surgical amphithe-ater, recovery room, anesthetizing room, plaster rooms, a bandage-making room, an x-ray and elec-

trocardiograph room, and a laboratory suite with connecting library; a seventh floor with a patient school operated by the City’s Department of Edu-cation; and a roof with two large solariums. All the Hospital’s features were means to an end—that its crippled patients be surrounded by a support-ive, healthful environment for healing.

At the new Hospital’s dedication and opening ceremonies on October 5, 1924, no fewer than 16 speeches were made. The Hospital conducted an open house, inviting the community to see its new home, including its dazzling new surgical and laboratory facilities. Dr. Reginald Sayre spoke of his father, Dr. Lewis Sayre, America’s first Ortho-paedic Chair:

I wish that my father could have lived to see this wonderful institution…There was no place where a crippled adult could receive proper treatment so as to prevent the ulti-mate destruction of his limbs and to make him a useful citizen….This hospital was the first to realize the necessity of this provi-sion.

In that year’s Annual Report, Henry Frauenthal, writing of the importance of orthopaedic research, observed that

although this is an orthopaedic hospital, modern investigation into the cause of acute and chronic joint conditions has brought out the fact that the source of about 80% of joint conditions is due to focal infection….In short, every field of specialism is required to consider these various foci….Now that we are blest with this marvelous new build-ing and its unstinted equipment, I wish to pledge to all the friends of the Institution the Staff’s best effort to make it one of the lead-ing hospital’s of the world.

• • •

Funding orthopaedic basic research had been dif-ficult, but greater things were now expected. In 1924, the Board hired Henry L. Jaffe, MD as Di-rector of the Department of Pathology and Labo-ratories. Jaffe, a doctor who would achieve great distinction in orthopaedics and pathology, wrote in his first Report to the Board and Attendees.

I have hopes for the development in our hos-pital, of a laboratory dedicated to a system-atic and concentrated study of diseases of bone. The field is a vast one, the possibilities for adding to our knowledge are unlimited.

• • •

In 1925, Alfred M. Heinsheimer, the brother of Henry Frauenthal’s wife Clara, bequeathed to the Hospital a 14-acre waterside estate in Far Rocka-way, the Natalie and Louis Heinsheimer Home, which came to be known simply as the Country Home. Patients were cared for there until 1952, by which time treatment no longer routinely included long periods of rest and outdoor convalescence.

Also in 1925, the Hospital operated a night clinic for the first time, making it easier for working fami-lies to seek and receive treatment. Approximately 20,057 new Dispensary patients were treated dur-ing that year, 4,000 more than in 1924. Previously, the greatest annual number of surgeries performed

in the Hospital had been 599; in the first year of the new building, that number jumped to 2,017.

Between 1919 and 1925, physicians who had been appointed by Henry Frauenthal and whose names are fondly remembered to this day began to appear regularly on Hospital and Dispensary rosters, including Leo Mayer, Samuel Jahss, and Henry Jaffe, who later honored Frauenthal by ded-icating to him his 1972 Metabolic, Degenerative, and Inflammatory Diseases of Bones and Joints.

As the Hospital evolved to include the exigen-cies of the community and the size of the staff increased, the Hospital changed its name, yet again, to Hospital for Joint Diseases and Medi-cal Center. This represented a broad expansion of services and objectives in response to conditions that would resurface in the 1970s and redefine the Hospital once again.

At the quarter-mark of the Twentieth Century, the Hospital Board elected its third President, Frederick Brown. Brown’s inaugural address at the

The new hospital building, on the original site, dedicated and opened October 5, 1924.

“Ladies of the Surgical Dressing Department.” Photo mid-1920s.

“A Section of Male Department, showing Mercury Vapor Quartz Light and Water Cooler Kromine Dis-pensary.” Photo mid-1920s.

“A Section of Female Department, showing Carbon Arc Light and Portable Teletherm.” Photo mid-1920s.


Twentieth Annual Board Meeting in 1925 echoed those of Henry Frauenthal’s in recent years, urging the creation of a large endowment fund for labora-tories and research.

Henry Jaffe’s report that same year gave rea-son enough for an endowment. He recently brought to the laboratories two associates with estimable backgrounds: the chemist Anna Mus-chel, PhD from the University of Vienna and bac-teriologist John E. Blair, PhD from Brown Univer-sity and, more recently, Stanford University. The endowment was meant to support a well-armed expedition into the unanswered questions of bone and joint disease. The next year Jaffe hired Aaron Bodansky, PhD (Cornell, 1921) , remembered for the Bodansky unit measuring a specific quantity of blood alkaline phosphatase. Bodansky’s work

with Jaffe resulted in the first test for alkaline phosphatase as a measure of bone activity or turnover. Modern tests with different names are based on the same principle. Bodansky’s further work centered on enzymes, the effects of thyroxin and insulin on carbohydrate metabolism, parathy-roid function, mineral and bone metabolism, and experimental pathology of the liver. Blair became well known for his work on parathyroid hormone. The collective work of Blair, Bodansky, and Jaffe resulted in classic discoveries in orthopaedics.

Henry Jaffe’s most famous work, however, was in oncology. His systematic classification of bone and cartilage tumors earned him the title of Fa-ther of Orthopaedic Pathology. In 1925, barely 30 years of age, Henry was asked by the Commit-tee of Post Graduate Education of the New York Academy of Medicine to institute his first impor-tant academic teaching course in bone and joint pathology, to be taught at the Hospital. Henry Jaffe’s pathology course would educate patholo-gists, orthopaedists, surgeons, and radiologists from around the country.

• • •

On March 11, 1927, Henry Frauenthal died at the age of 64. This period was also marked by the death of two long-term Directors of the Board, Leo Doblin and Frederick W. Kaufman, as well as the Board’s First Vice President, Charles Kaye, and one of the Hospital’s two Attending Surgeons, Walter M. Brickner, MD. Although the leadership of the Hospital was reconstituted, no new Physi-cian and Surgeon-in-Chief would be appointed for

several years. Herman Frauenthal, Harry Finkel-stein, and Leo Mayer now held the highest clinical positions of the Hospital staff.

The majority of Henry Frauenthal’s $300,000 estate was bequeathed to the Hospital’s laborato-ry endowment fund. In 1928, a memorial statue of Henry Frauenthal, clad in the type of surgical gown he would have worn when the Hospital opened in 1905, was placed in a corner of the Hospital lobby. The statue is today located outside the entrance of the Hospital.

This same period was marked a series of un-dertakings that provided continuity with the past and set the Hospital on a strong academic and research track. In July 1927, an annual Henry W. Frauenthal Travel Scholarship ($2,400) was estab-lished for study in leading European and American clinics. J. Wishner (1927), D. Sashin (1928), M. Rabinowitz (1929), and M. S. Burman (1930) were among its first recipients. The Scholarship is still awarded today. Two Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Brown Orthopaedic Research Fellowships were estab-lished (1928-1930) for investigative study to be undertaken at the Hospital; initial recipients were D. Sashin, D. H. Kling, and L. Nathan. Kling and Na-than investigated, among other subjects, the mag-got method of treating osteomyelitis. In October 1930, the Walter Brickner Memorial Lectures were established to encourage interest in medicine and surgery. The same year, the annual Sir Robert Jones Lectures were established to bring to “our staff and the profession an opportunity of gaining knowledge in an important branch of medicine.”

The Sir Robert Jones Lecture, which continues to be held annually at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, is the oldest—and, it is maintained, the most dis-tinguished—orthopaedic lectureship in the world.

During this period an important new Consul-tant in Pathology joined the Hospital, James Ew-ing, MD (1866-1943), previously first Professor of Pathology at Cornell University and known for identifying Ewing’s sarcoma (1921). Ewing laid the foundation for creation of Memorial Sloan-Ketter-ing Cancer Center in New York.

Henry Jaffe also made an important request to the Board for a small number of beds to be at the temporary disposal of the laboratories, indicative of what was to come, one of Jaffe’s most durable contributions: the clinical and pathological correla-tion approach to the diagnosis of orthopaedic dis-ease.

In 1929, the Board created the position of Ex-ecutive Director (replacing Administrator) and ap-

pointed J. J. Golub, MD, a physician with experi-ence in hospital administration and an innovative administrator for many years. The following year he brought on staff Abraham Rosenberg, a future Executive Director. Golub wrote an invaluable Hos-pital survey in 1945 with recommendations for the Hospital’s postwar growth, “The Past, Pres-ent, and Future of the Hospital for Joint Diseases, New York, 1904-1945—A Survey and Recommen-dations.”

Perhaps the most lasting change during these this period was the establishment in 1929 of the first Medical Advisory Board. Leo Mayer was Vice President (Attending Orthopaedic Surgeon), and Ignac Neumann President (Attending Physician). The new Medical Advisory Board, replacing the Medical Advisory Committee, worked more close-ly with the Board of Directors and from a more powerful platform.

The 1928 memorial statue of Henry Frauenthal, in turn-of-the-century oper-ating room attire, that stands guard out-side the Hospital entrance to this day.

Patients queued up outside the Dispensary, circa 1930.

Patients receiving treatment at the Hospital’s “Coun-try Home” in Far Rockaway, which opened in 1925 and stayed in operation until 1952


1930 ~ 1955 In the wake of the death of the Hospital’s found-

er and guiding light Henry Frauenthal, MD in 1927, no simple solution had presented itself to

the problem of how to structure a new leadership. Eventually it was decided to organize Orthopaedic Surgery around four independent Services, each with a Chief and staff of Associates, Adjuncts, and Clinical Assistants. The first four Service Chiefs in this new era were Harry Finkelstein, MD, Leo Mayer, MD, Herman C. Frauenthal, MD, and Sam-uel Kleinberg, MD. For over two decades, until 1953, when Joseph Milgram, MD became the Hospital’s first Director of Orthopaedic Surgery and implemented a wholesale reorganization, the Hospital’s orthopaedic clinical operations were di-rected by the Service Chiefs—most often four, but during some periods five (1939-1942) or even six (1935-1939). Among other Service Chiefs before the 1953 transformation were Joseph Buchman, MD, Samuel A. Jahss, MD, Emanuel B. Kaplan, MD, Henry Milch, MD, Harry D. Sonnenschein, MD, and Isadore Zadek, MD.

Among the prestigious additions to Hospital staff during this period was the orthopaedic sur-gical consultant Fred Houdlett Albee, MD (1876-1945), a pioneer in bone graft surgery and spinal

fusion technique, including the first to employ liv-ing bone grafts as internal splints. Albee, who was President of the American Orthopaedic Associa-tion in 1929, filled the position previously held by Reginald H. Sayre.

Laboratory research was moving forward, with fourteen papers and presentations by Department of Pathology staff in one year alone. Drs. Jaffe, Blair, and Bodansky were gaining recognition for the quality and originality of their work in pathol-ogy, by both the Board and by the world orthopae-dic community: over $30,000 was added to the research fund, then a considerable sum.

The Frauenthal Travel Scholarship for 1930–1931 was awarded to Michael S. Burman, MD (1901-1976), who traveled to Dresden to study with Professor Georg Schmorl at the Institute of Pathology of the Krankenhaus der Friedrichstadt and continued his cadaveric arthroscopic studies. Burman returned to write his classic 1931 paper “Arthroscopy, or Direct Visualization of Joints: An Experimental Cadaver Study” for the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. He continued his work at the Hospital on arthroscopic examination of joints with Harry Finkelstein, Leo Mayer, and Charles Sutro, publishing classic articles from 1931 to 1936.

In 1931, Sidney Bernstein, MD (Resident class of 1931) was named the 1931-1932 Frauenthal Travel Scholarship recipient, the same year Ed-ward Haboush and Charles J. Sutro were also or-thopaedic residents.

The Medical Advisory Board that had been es-tablished in 1929 had a new President, Leo May-er, MD. In his 1931 address to the Board, Mayer praised the original organization of the Hospital that “joined hands with all the branches of medi-cine and surgery” as an orthopaedic ideal. May-er’s address set the tone for the Hospital’s belated

twenty-fifth anniversary celebration the next year. The Hospital’s twenty-fifth anniversary had

come and gone in 1930 without official celebra-tion. Whatever the reason—perhaps the Depres-sion (although charitable contributions from New York’s wealthiest had not diminished)—in 1932 the Hospital made up for it. A celebratory “Clinical Week” of lectures and case study presentations were held at the Hospital, hosted in conjunction with the New York Academy of Medicine; the first day’s presentations included cases by S. Kleinberg (reconstruction arthroplasty), J. Buchman (chron-ic osteolyelitis treated with maggots), I. Zadek (tendon transplantation for deltoid paralysis), L. Mayer (tendon transplantation), and N. Ranaohoff (Krukenberg amputation). There was a memorable dinner at the Plaza. A silver and blue anniversa-ry dinner program that survives tells us that the speakers included officers of the Board, as well as Dr. Leo Mayer on “The Medical Significance of the Hospital”; Mayer also brought “motion pic-tures.” Kleinberg spoke of the Hospital’s future, and others spoke on such topics as “The Hospital and Organized Medicine.” The musical program included Metropolitan Opera contralto Mme. Mar-garet Matzenauer (whose concert recordings are still in circulation), and the dinner menu included, among other delicacies, Green Turtle Amontillado Soup and Brook Trout Belle Meuniere.

• • •

In 1933, with the passing of its long-time patron and quintessential volunteer Minnie Rothschild Frauenthal, Herman’s widow, Mrs. Frederick

Brown, wife of the Board’s President, succeeded her as President of the Ladies Auxiliary.

• • •

The centuries-old application of maggots to clean open wounds, while in common use on the bat-tlefield, was not seriously accepted in the clinical setting until the twentieth century. Among the pioneers in this practice were Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York. The Hospital performed research on this technology and established a laboratory for cultivating the maggots for postoperative wound

care. Joseph Buchman, Maurice Pomeranz, and John E. Blair published on the successful applica-tion and treatment of chronic osteomyelitis using maggot therapy.

• • •

The Hospital would occasionally treat a “personal-ity”: Rudy Valee is one known to have been a pa-tient. Other celebrities—among them Babe Ruth and Fanny Brice—would from time to time visit the children’s ward, providing a welcome distrac-tion and bringing an much-needed smile to the youngsters’ faces.

Program of the Hospital’s Twenty-fifth Anniver-sary Dinner—celebrated in 1932 (see text).

Babe Ruth visiting Hospital children afflicted with polio. From the New York Sun, December 13, 1941

Hizzoner Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia promoting wound-ed police officer treated at the Hospital. From the New York Daily News, June 1937.


• • •

Throughout the years of the Great Depression, the hospital kept pace with its goals and completed a successful long-term fund drive to complete a three-phase building and renovation plan. A large Out-Patient Department Building was constructed to extend from 123rd Street (four stories), the main entrance, to 124th Street (two stories). The Dispensary’s operations moved to its interior. The new building opened on February 7, 1939 and was dedicated on November 23 as the Leo L. Doblin Memorial, after the past Director of the Board. The first floor included a modern lobby, pharmacy, of-fices, registration booths, examining rooms, and

isolation areas for ad-mission of contagious patients. Other floors included a new medi-cal library and records room, clinics, a pool for hydrotherapy, and rooms for occupational therapy. The new facil-ity transformed the operations of the Hos-pital. Each clinic includ-ed a room for a social worker.

A complete remod-eling of the interior of the old Dispensary was accompanied by an external facelift. The

building acquired the practical new name of Pro-fessional Services Building and on February 7 was rededicated as the Melanie Faith Polachek Cour-nand Memorial Professional Services Building, in memory of the daughter of Board member John Polachek. The building now housed clinical servic-es for both inpatients and outpatients, including laboratories, blood bank, x-ray facilities, physical therapy, social work and occupational therapy de-partments, a brace shop, emergency rooms, and a room dedicated to preparation of surgical dress-ings by the Ladies Auxiliary. Over the next several years, more renovations were implemented: mod-ern surgical suites, a modern lobby, a larger dining

room, and more semiprivate and private rooms. In 1939 the Medical Advisory Board, taking

stock of changes in medicine, made the following recommendations “speaking to the future”:

• The Hospital must become a teaching institu-tion affiliated with a medical school or provide independently postgraduate courses in order to stay abreast of medicine and the medical sciences. (The Hospital was already blazing a new research trail; the Medical Advisory Board considered this recommendation the necessary complement to that part of its mission.)

• The current six Services of the Hospital should be reduced to four, as it was now recognized that a larger number of Services prevented any single Service from collecting “a large number of orthopaedic conditions” and that for the pur-pose of conducting studies, a small number of cases was “unimpressive.”

• A new method must be devised whereby sur-

geons can gather and group cases from all Ser-vices, correlating them for study and publica-tion.

* Because orthopaedics, a young specialty, was ripe for pioneering work, the Hospital should seek to cull and cultivate physicians for its staff from among its own graduates.

The year 1940 witnessed the inaugural issue of the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases, with Samuel Kleinberg, MD as its first editor. The Bulletin, whose stated purpose was to “serve as a medium for placing skeletal disease within its proper framework of medical science a whole,” at first accepted papers only from Hospital staff: it was originally intended as a permanent record of the Hospital’s clinical investigations and research studies. It is today still the second oldest orthopae-dic journal in the English language in continuous publication. (See “Classic papers from the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases “on page 44.)

Wartime conditions in the 1940s brought prob-lems for all hospitals, and the Hospital for Joint Diseases was no exception. Of the Hospital’s 338 staff physicians, 35% volunteered and were com-missioned in the armed services; an even greater percentage of all Hospital employees left to join the service or to take jobs in industry. Medical, surgical, and general supplies were difficult to pro-cure and, when available, much more expensive than before the war. Bed occupancy was high, but salaries had to be increased to retain staff and to offset steep increases in the cost of living. An Emergency Field Unit was created and main-

tained by the Hospital at the request of the federal government. The Hospital was an official casualty station, its emergency rooms and 30 beds held in ready for any emergency. Strategic material salvage programs were organized. The Hospital became a depot for distribution of penicillin, de-livering 20,000,000 units for its own patients and those in neighboring hospitals. To compensate for the shortage in qualified nurses, nurse aides were used more extensively.

• • •

On August 23, 1942, Herman C. Frauenthal passed away. Dr. Frauenthal had retired from the active staff in 1936, at 70 years of age, but had main-tained a consulting status until his death, emblem-atic of his steadfast commitment to the Hospital.

• • •

It is possible that nurse shortages prompted the Hospital, shortly after the war, to fulfill a plan, first advanced in 1924, to establish a nursing school for

training in orthopaedic care. Whatever the reason, one of the Hospital’s first major postwar endeav-ors was implementation of a one-year course in practical nursing. Two-thirds of the seventh floor of the Main building was allocated for the purpose and five staff members appointed: a Director, As-sistant Director, Nursing Arts Instructor, Teaching Supervisor Instructor, and Home Economics In-structor. The first class of 16 women were admit-ted in 1945 and graduated in 1946 as Licensed Practical Nurses. The school was a great success, and classes increased in size each year. In 1955, the Hospital’s School of Nursing received a sub-stantial grant for its operations from the Helen Fuld Health Foundation and was rededicated as the Helen Fuld School of Nursing.

During Harry Sonnenschein’s tenure as Presi-dent of the Medical Advisory Board in 1947-1948, plans were made to procure a radiation therapy machine for a cancer prevention program estab-lished in 1946, including a new nerve block clinic under the Department of Anesthesia, headed by Dr. Albert Betcher, and the establishment of a Re-habilitative Service and an Arthritis Clinic with a Bone Bank.

The Hospital was now holding postgraduate courses in conjunction with other institutions, strengthening its academic standing and interac-tion with the orthopaedic community at large. In 1949, courses were offered in conjunction with the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in Orthopaedic Surgery, Radiology, and Pathology under Samuel Kleinberg, Maurice Pomeranz, and Henry Jaffe, respectively.

The Leo L. Doblin Memorial Out-Patient Building. Inset: Laying of the cornerstone, June 6, 1938. Hospital President Frederick Brown is at left..

Therapeutic pool, Doblin Out-Patient Building Practical Nursing class session, 1945.


Eminent Physicians and Orthopaedic Surgeons in Hospital for Joint Diseases History

at the Hospital; Bulloughs is Chief of Pathology at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

Harry D. Sonnenschein, MD (d. 1950)

Harry Sonnenschein served in the American Expe-ditionary Force in World War I. Following the Armi-stice, his experience in trauma surgery prompted him to develop an association with the trauma service at Harlem Hospital and to contribute to the literature on surgery/trauma fractures. Son-nenschein joined the Hospital for Joint Diseases in 1922, taking the position of Chief of Plaster in the Out Patient Department. In 1936 he became an attending and was appointed Chief of Service V, a post he held for 11 years.

Harry Sonnenschein actively contributed to res-ident training and initiated a popular lecture series for residents so well received that the talks were bound and published annually in book form. He was considered a progressive in his orthopaedic thinking and was President of the Medical Advi-sory Board in 1947 and 1948. In a memorial trib-ute printed in the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases, he was portrayed as a physician with an intense interest in newer methods of operative treatment, a man who could bring humor to a seri-ous discussion, and a surgeon who “uttered many a wise word at the Service conferences, where he will be missed.”

Henry Lewis Jaffe, MD (1896-1979)

After graduating from the New York University School of Medicine (1920), Henry Jaffe completed a general internship at Montefiore Hospital and a surgical internship at Bellevue Hospital. At the age of 28, he left a junior position at Montefiore to be-come Pathologist and Director of Laboratories at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, a post he held for 40 years.

Jaffe brought unprecedented clarity and organi-zation to the field of orthopaedic pathology, pub-lishing over 130 articles. Two of his books, Tumors and Tumorous Conditions of the Bones and Joints (1958) and Metabolic, Degenerative, and Inflam-matory Diseases of Bones and Joints (1972), re-main classics of orthopaedic pathology. In 1952, he was named an honorary member of the Royal Society of Medicine of London.

Several pathological conditions bear Jaffe’s name, including the Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome, the Jaffe-Lichtenstein syndrome, and the Jaffe-Li-chtenstein-Sutro syndrome. (Louis Lichtenstein, MD was an internationally honored pathologist who worked at the Hospital with Jaffe for 12 years; Charles J. Sutro, MD, was an attending orthopae-dic surgeon at the Hospital.)

Jaffe’s contribution to education is legendary. Through many years of teaching, he passed on one of his most durable contributions, the intro-duction of the clinical and pathological correlation approach to the diagnosis of orthopaedic disease. In 1951, on the occasion of his twenty-fifth anni-versary as Directors of Laboratories, the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases published a liv-ing tribute to him, a dedicated volume of 55 es-says written by those who knew and admired him. The Editor of the Bulletin, Samuel Kleinberg, MD, wrote:

To Dr. Jaffe, pathology and pathologic physi-ology are merely centers from which light is shed on the total disease picture presented by the patient.

When in 1964 Howard Dorfman, MD succeed-ed Jaffe (who continued to come to the Pathol-ogy Department daily), there were two pathology fellows being trained by Jaffe: Peter Bulloughs, MD and German Steiner, MD. Steiner is currently Chairman of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Henry Milch, MD, FACS (1895-1964)

Henry Milch graduated from the Columbia Univer-sity College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1920, interned at Mount Sinai Hospital, studied pathol-ogy abroad for one year, practiced as an adjunct surgeon on his return, and joined the staff of the Hospital for Joint Diseases in 1923 as an Adjunct Attending Orthopaedist. In 1930, Dr. Milch be-came part of the Service of Harry D. Finkelstein and worked with E. B. Kaplan, E. J. Haboush, and D. Sashin. By 1940, Milch was one of the five Ser-vice Chiefs (along with Mayer, Kleinberg, Sonnen-schein, and Zadek).

Milch specialized in anatomy and was an in-structor in that subject at his alma mater, Columbia University, for over 35 years. He studied joint-axis disturbances, applying his mathematical talents to the analysis of malalignment syndromes. He described ischial epiphysitis syndrome and bone alterations in Gaucher’s disease, and was a pio-

Joseph Elias Milgram, MD (1900-1987)

Joseph E. Milgram was the Hospital’s first Direc-tor of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery (1953). His mission was to unify the Department’s Services by coordinating the research, clinical, and teaching activities of the orthopaedic inpatient and outpatient services as well as to reinvigorate the Hospital’s education and research programs. Mil-gram was a man who knew how to embrace more than “one best solution” and achieved his mission during a distinguished 13-year tenure as Director of the Department.

As Army Major Joseph Milgram during World War II, Milgram served with distinction and dem-onstrated superior administrative skills as Ortho-paedic Section Head of two elite military hospitals: Iowa’s Schick General Hospital (1300 bed capacity) and Missouri’s O’Reilly General Army Hospital.

neer in the study of bone formation (photoelastic stress analysis). In later years, Dr. Milch devoted himself to the study of deformities of the upper femur and corrective procedures related to hip an-kylosis disability. His dedication to a broad range of orthopaedic subjects resulted in 175 papers and several monographs.

Milch was active in professional societies and a founding member and Diplomate of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery. He was awarded honorary membership in the Société Française d’Orthopédie et de Traumatologie in the early 1960s. He also somehow found time to enjoy such outside interests as archeology, philosophy, and music and was a founding member of two physi-cian orchestras, including the Doctor’s Orchestra of New York. In his fortieth year at the Hospital, in 1960, Henry Milch was honored with the title Emeritus Attending Orthopaedic Surgeon. (Continues)


internship at the Hospital for Joint Diseases less than two months after arriving in the country. In 1926, as a resident, Lapidus was assigned to the Dispensary examination rooms under the supervi-sion of Samuel Jahss. In 1930 Lapidus became an Assistant Adjunct, along with Emanuel Kaplan and David Sloane. According to a memorial article writ-ten by Melvin Jahss, MD it was also the year of Lapidus’s first publication on the foot.

Lapidus, a superlative teacher, surgeon, acade-mician, and clinician, was appointed Chief of the Hospital’s Foot Service—the first in the United States—in the mid-1950s. He held a professor-ship at New York Medical College, was a founding member of the American Orthopaedic Foot Soci-ety, and was internationally honored for his many contributions to the field of foot surgery, among them articles on hallux valgus with metatarsus pri-mus varus, peroneal spastic flatfoot, claw hallux, and inconstant bones of the foot. Several proce-dures bear his name. His course on lesions of the foot, given in 1941 at the Polytechnic Clinic, repre-sented the first time a postgraduate course on the hand had been offered anywhere.

Dr. Lapidus enjoyed the highest respect of his colleagues during his 40-year career at the Hospi-tal. The esteem in which he was held was reflect-ed by the publication of a commemorative issue of the Bulletin of the Hospital of Joint Diseases six years after his death.

Samuel A. Jahss, MD (1891-1943)

Samuel Jahss graduated from the College of the City of New York and Long Island College Medical School. While serving as an intern at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital, he met Lewis A. Sayre, MD, who guided him to the Hospital for Joint Dis-eases to become an assistant to Henry Frauen-thal. Jahss subsequently joined the Hospital staff and was promoted to Associate in 1929, joining the Service of Herman Frauenthal and working with Drs. Joseph G. Wishner and David Sloane. In 1936, he became an Attending and one of five Service Chiefs.

Under Henry Jaffe’s tutelage, Jahss pursued a systematic study of bone pathology in the labo-

ratories. Among his other contributions to the literature are his descriptions of two orthopaedic techniques that achieved excellent outcomes: an application of the principle of levers to compress or separate bones in pelvic fractures and a simple, effective treatment for fractures of the proximal phalanges and metacarpals.

According to a tribute in a 1943 issue of the Bul-letin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases, residents in particular appreciated Jahss’s attention to detail and his instructional style.

Milgram’s vision and skills resulted in a broad, intensified teaching program for residents that co-ordinated the talents of the entire staff as program leaders. He strongly encouraged specialization in Orthopaedics, reorganizing the Hospital’s Services and appointing talented Chiefs along the lines of orthopaedic specialties both existing and emerg-ing, including Foot, Hand, Pediatrics, and Scoliosis/Spine. He is remembered as an influential teacher, always critical of ideas, never of people.

Milgram emphasized basic science learning, and oversaw, with Dr. Henry Jaffe’s support, the creation in 1963 of the Research Institute for Skel-etomuscular Diseases, dedicated as the Dr. Harry Britenstool Memorial, after a long-time respected Hospital Attending and physiatrist.

Dr. Milgram also devised several orthopaedic surgical procedures and contributed extensively to the scientific literature. He is responsible for Milgram’s test, which confirms the presence of pathology either inside or outside the spinal cord sheath.

His formal education included graduation from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (1924) and the University of Vienna (MS, 1925), and he attended the University of Iowa for his orthopaedic training (1932). Milgram had been a visiting surgeon (Adjunct) at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in the 1930s under the Service of Leo Mayer. Milgram retired in 1966, honoring the mandatory retirement rule then in effect, at which time he was designated the Hospital’s first Direc-tor Emeritus of Orthopaedic Surgery.

Leo Mayer, MD, FACS (1884-1972)

Leo Mayer joined the Hospital for Joint Diseases in 1924 as an Attending. At 40 years of age, he was already widely recognized as a master sur-geon and well known for his seminal 1916 paper “Physiological Method of Tendon Transplantation,” which was influential in the establishment of mod-ern hand surgery. In 1926 he further revolutionized the field by observing that traumatic division of the extensor tendons, a condition contraindicated for primary repair, could be successfully treated by a tendon transplantation method (for example, via the extensor communis digitorum tendon of the index finger).

Trained at Harvard, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (1909), and Mount Si-nai Hospital, Mayer also studied in Munich with Professor Fritz Lange, in Berlin with Konrad Biesal-ski, and a for brief but valuable period with Robert Jones, MD in Liverpool. He was the recipient of numerous national and international honors, in-cluding selection as the Moynihan lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

At the invitation of Basil O’Connor, President of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and (later the March of Dimes), Mayer served as medical advisor on the Foundation’s Committee for the Prevention and Treatment of After-Effects from 1939 to 1948. Largely because of Dr. May-er’s involvement, the Hospital received $28,050 in Foundation grants in 1939 and 1940.

In his lectures, which were typically standing-room-only, Dr. Mayer displayed the gift of a great teacher able to distill the essence of a case or clin-ical problem and present it with great clarity. His contributions to the field and to the Hospital were inestimable and remain a great legacy.

Paul W. Lapidus (1893-1981)

In the course of his distinguished career at the Hospital, Dr. Paul Lapidus earned the title “Fa-ther of Foot Surgery.” Born in Russia, the son of a physician, he took his medical training at the University of Odessa (1916). On graduation, he entered the Russian Medical corps, emigrating to the United States in 1923 where he began an


Samuel Kleinberg, MD (1885-1957)

Samuel Kleinberg’s family emigrated to the Unit-ed States from Kiev when he was five years old and eventually settled in New York City, where he went on to attend The City College of New York and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (1908). He then served an orthopae-dic apprenticeship specializing in scoliosis under Royal Whitman, MD at the Hospital for the Rup-tured and Crippled (now the Hospital for Special Surgery), where he remained until his mentor re-tired in 1929. Kleinberg then joined the Hospital for Joint Diseases, bringing along with him several of his colleagues, and served as an Attending and Service Chief.

Samuel Kleinberg was the first Editor of the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases, serv-ing in that capacity from 1940 until his death. His stewardship was rewarded by the Bulletin’s steady growth. He was instrumental, with W. C. Campbell, in the founding of the American Acad-emy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and was an Execu-tive Committee member of that organization. In

1934, the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery appointed him to its first board. He was Chair of the New York Academy of Medicine’s Orthopaedic Section and the first Chair of the New York State Medical Society.

Kleinberg’s made many valuable contributions to the field of scoliosis, including spine fusion, as well as fractures, limb deformities from infantile paralysis, and pediatric flat and weak feet. His evaluation of nonoperative methods in his two-volume Scoliosis, published in the 1920s, was an important addition to the field. Kleinberg was ac-tive in residency teaching. One of his oft-quoted aphorisms was, “An orthopaedic surgeon is one who has unlimited patience and optimism.”

dus A classical scholar and linguist in addition to being a gifted anatomist and teacher, Kaplan was honored time and again during his lifetime for his original contributions to hand anatomy and hand surgery and for his resident teaching.

A comparative anatomist, Kaplan spent end-less hours at the Bronx Zoo observing the limbs of chimpanzees and gorillas at close range and made frequent expeditions to the American Museum of Natural History to study the wide range of primate specimens available there. His anatomical obser-vations have been described as “voluminous,” and his studies, many of which led to innovative orthopaedic procedures, are recorded in over one hundred papers and four books.

Emanuel Kaplan essentially defined the field of hand surgery, insisting for years that it be recog-nized as an independent specialty. The Hand Ser-vice that he organized at the Hospital was the first in New York City and made him, as Henry Mankin, MD, wrote in a tribute in the Bulletin of the Hospi-tal for Joint Diseases in 1984, “one of the patron saints of every Hand Service in the world.” The New York Society for Surgery of the Hand contin-ues to confer the Emanuel B. Kaplan Award for an outstanding anatomical or scientific paper on the subject of his life’s interest.

Emanuel B. Kaplan, MD (1894-1980)

Emanuel Kaplan took a degree in medicine from the Ukraine’s Kharkov Imperial University in 1916 and emigrated to the United States in 1924, where he became the Hospital for Joint Diseases’ second orthopaedic resident, training alongside Paul Lapi-

To a Hospital blessed with an abundance of distinguished surgeons there came in 1950 a resident who quickly distinguished himself as the recipient of the Frederick Brown Research Fellow-ship award. Melvin H. Jahss, MD, son of Samuel Jahss, studied epiphyseolysis of the hip and was awarded a gold medal in 1951-1952 for best ex-hibit in a clinical field at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

The Hospital’s Cancer Prevention and Detection Center was now open four nights a week and still had a three-month waiting list. Cancer beds were added for longer-term care, but there was a need for a state-of-the-art therapy program. The answer came with a gift from the Lila Motley League and Trustees and friends of the Hospital, which pro-vided a 2 million volt x-ray therapy machine for the cancer program. To house the unit, a two-story an-nex was built east of the Doblin Out-Patient Build-ing, and several stories were added to the Doblin building itself. The annex was dedicated as the Lila Motley Radiation Therapy Department, and the new complex included offices, the new William Blau Lecture Hall, and educational facilities for the Helene Fuld School of Nursing.

• • •

In 1952, the Hospital for the first time initiated talks with another institution, Mount Sinai Hospi-tal, to explore the idea of establishing a formal af-filiation—something the Medical Advisory Board had previously suggested as a way for the Hos-pital to enrich its academic and teaching func-tions while maintaining its identity as a specialty

hospital. After lengthy discussion, the Board and Hospital staff recommended against the move, the Trustees accepted their recommendation, and negotiations were ended.

The previous four administrative Chiefs of Ser-vice had been Joseph Buchman, Henry Milch, Isadore Zadek, and Emanuel Kaplan. Hospital Executive Administrator J. J. Golub, MD had re-tired in 1951 and was ably succeeded by Abraham Rosenberg, but the challenges of an inflationary economy, staggering increases in hospital costs, shortages of both nurses and physicians, and the retirement of the Hospital’s most experienced Chiefs, Leo Mayer and Samuel Kleinberg, had made some sort of change inevitable. In 1953, the

Hospital, still seeking to revitalize its mission, ap-pointed as Director of the Department of Ortho-paedic Surgery Joseph E. Milgram, MD, who was given broader authority than anyone since Henry Frauenthal.

While Milgram had great leeway to do what he sought necessary, it was his deft leadership skills that contributed most to his success. By 1955, Orthopaedic Surgery was represented by eight specialty clinics: Orthopaedic-Pediatric (J. E. Milgram), Infections of Bones and Joints (J. Buch-

Annual Alumni Scientific Session, 1956.

Two million volt x-ray therapy machine in the Radia-tion Therapy Department, circa 1955.


man), Clubfoot (C. M. Hanisch and J. Alper), Hand (E. B. Kaplan), Poliomyelitis (W. Green), Scoliosis (J. J. Graham), and Joint Orthopaedic/Neurological for the Study of Low Back Pain (A. Kaplan). There was also a newly formed Resident Clinic, operat-ing under Milgram’s personal direction.

A report to the Medical Advisory Board by its President Joseph Buchman, MD on the eve of the Hospital’s semicentennial in 1955 expressed enthusiasm over the new operative suites in the Main Building, including their “conductive floors” (to prevent static electricity from igniting anesthe-sia gases), soundproof walls and ceilings, shad-owless illumination, and built-in view boxes. Buch-man gave due credit to Albert Betcher, MD, Chief of Anesthesiology, for his direction of the new recovery rooms and coordinated operations with the surgical suites, which contributed so greatly to “the patient’s comfort and the lessening of the surgeon’s burden.” Beginning in 1949, the Hospital accepted two anesthesia residents annually. Buch-man’s report also mentioned the new postgradu-ate course of the Rheumatology/Arthritis Service, established in 1949 under the direction of Otto Steinbrocker, MD, as well as the progress of the Department of Rehabilitation, which was awaiting a federal government contract for personnel and equipment. The scientific activities of the medical staff in the mid-1950s were represented in Annual

The Hospital in the mid-1950s.

1955 ~ 1980

Reports of that era by three to five pages of cita-tions: books, articles, exhibits, presentations, and guest lectures. The Hospital was accomplishing its work and engaging the scientific community in an ongoing practical and academic dialogue.

In a special gold-covered issue of the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases, Executive Director Abraham Rosenberg commemorat-

ed the Hospital’s first fifty years, comparing the single-brownstone Hospital that had opened with seven beds and eight patients to the existing 300-bed-capacity Hospital that occupied two-thirds of a city block and treated 20,000 outpatients annu-ally. The net capital assets of the Hospital had also grown, from $12,404 to $8 million, and it enjoyed an annual operating budget of $21/2 million. Sev-enty percent of the beds were devoted to ortho-paedic cases. Whereas the original medical staff had consisted of 40 physicians and surgeons, in 1956 there were over 300 physicians, surgeons, and dentists and 40 residents. The Departments of Orthopaedic Surgery, Radiology and Radiation, and Pathology were widely recognized for their original and continuing contributions to the medi-cal and scientific literature.

As part of the Fiftieth Anniversary celebration, the Main building was rededicated the Frederick Brown Pavilion in recognition of the past Presi-dent’s service and generosity for 23 years (1925-1948). A Fiftieth Anniversary Scientific Program was conducted, and a dinner was held at the Wal-dorf-Astoria attended by 800 guests and featuring

as speakers Dr. Detley W. Bronk, President of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and Dr. Paul C. Colonna, past President of the American Orthopaedic Association, both of whom praised the Hospital for its stellar contributions to the com-munity and the nation. Members of the Frauenthal

family in attendance included co-founder Herman C. Frauenthal, Sr., MD as well as Board member Herman C. Frauenthal, Jr. along with his wife Ros-lyn and their sons Stephen and James.

In the late 1950s, the Hospital’s four-year resi-dency program accepted five to six residents per

1962 Resident and Intern Graduation Dinner, 1962.


class and consisted of one year each of general internship and surgical internship and two years of orthopaedic training. Joseph Milgram’s reor-ganization of the Department in 1953 had been well received, as he energetically supported the talents of his prominent staff (including those who had retired as consultants but still remained active): Leo Mayer, in tendon surgery and polio; Samuel Kleinberg, a longtime Chief specializing in scoliosis; Sidney Bernstein, already an expert in fractures, especially around the hip; Michael Bur-man, a forward thinker who developed the earliest arthroscopic procedures; Paul Lapidus, a pioneer in foot and ankle surgery; Joseph Buchman, an au-thority on osteomyelitis whose studies advanced the clinical application of maggot therapy and one of the first clinicians to use antibiotics in combina-

tion with surgical management; and Henry Milch, an expert on hip reconstructive surgery and cor-rection of bony deformities, on which latter sub-ject he had written an influential book. In 1956, there were seven Orthopaedic Attendings (S. Ber-nstein, J. Buchman, M. S. Burman, B. Kleiger, H. Milch, and C. J. Sutro).

Joseph Milgram also had an eye for the talents of the next generation of surgeons, whom he firmly believed would and should enrich the grow-ing field of orthopaedic specialties. Often he sug-gested that residents pursue one or another spe-cialty, and often he was right on the mark— but not always. Wallace Lehman, MD, (Resident Class of 1962 and later Chief of Pediatric Orthopaedics) recalls that Milgram thought scoliosis might suit him well, but it would prove to be Barry Kleiger,

MD (assistant to Leo Mayer), one of the first phy-sicians at the Hospital to treat clubfoot, who even-tually became Lehman’s mentor.

Other notable residents of this era include Felix Rosenhain, MD (1960), for whom an endowed an-nual memorial lecture series continues to this day; Herman Robbins, MD (1955), who became the Hospital’s first Director of Pediatric Surgery, and Alfred Grant, MD (1961), who went on to become Director of the Hospital’s pioneering programs in neuromuscular diseases and later put in place the first multidisciplinary pediatric orthopaedic treat-ment program at the Hospital, the Center for the Neuromuscular and Developmentally Disabled, at a time when other New York medical institu-tions were concerned only with diagnosis. Henry Mankin (Resident class of 1960), who would later succeed Milgram, also developed a strong inter-est in pediatric orthopaedics.

Melvin Jahss, MD (1950) was mentored by Paul Lapidus in foot and ankle surgery and would become one of the major figures in that field and author of some of its most important publications. Robert Leffert, MD performed resident studies involving electromyographic testing along with and Victor Frankel, MD. Leffert would become a brachial plexus expert, with particular emphasis on brachial plexopathies and mononeuropathies. On completing his residency at the Hospital in 1958, Frankel, with the help of two years’ fund-ing from a Henry W. Frauenthal Travel Scholarship and a March of Dimes Fellowship, studied in Swe-den, earning a doctorate in biomechanics. Frankel would proceed to a distinguished career as one

of the “Fathers of Biomechanics” in orthopaedic surgery and later returned as Department Chair-man in the 1980s.

Martin Posner, MD (Resident Class of 1967) and Richard Smith, MD (1960) were both mentored by Emanuel Kaplan and later became partners in a hand surgery practice. Smith would later succeed his mentor as Chief of the Hand Service and in 1972 moved to Massachusetts General Hospital to become its Chief of Hand Surgery, a position he holds today. Posner would later as well become Chief of the Hospital’s Hand Service, a position he still holds.

Tribute is also due to those Hospital physicians who advanced the development of pediatric sur-gery as a full subspecialty of orthopaedics: Mayer, Kleinberg, Kleiger, C. Hanish, Kaplan, Lapidus, Milch, Robbins, Mankin, Lehman, and Grant.

Perhaps the ultimate compliment to a student is to succeed one’s mentor: Henry Mankin suc-ceeded Joseph Milgram as Department Director/Chairman, in 1966, Herman Robbins succeeded Mankin, in 1972, and Victor Frankel succeeded Robbins in 1981.

Both attendings and residents of the time recall that in the 1950s and ‘60s residents stayed at the Hospital “day and night,” came to know each other very well, and knew every patient in the hospital by name. The residents spent time teaching one another. Four were on call every night. Informal teaching frequently spilled over into spontaneous cafeteria lunch “conferences.” The library doubled as a nighttime hangout, and everyone went to follow-up conferences held by Sidney Bernstein,

where for each condition being studied as many as ten cases were presented, each with a mini-mum five-year follow-up.

There were also (voluntary) night classes, at midnight or later, with master anatomist-surgeon Herman Robbins, who came to teach the residents for several hours after his hospital and private practice duties were finished. In such a manner, under the direction of Joseph Milgram the Depart-ment of Orthopaedic Surgery was developing a close-knit staff that included some of the finest

future leaders in orthopaedics, an even stronger academic program, and an even more diversified institution.

• • •

The origins of the residents-and-attendings Beef-steak Dinner that became an annual event at some point in the 1950s are as shrouded in mys-tery as the proceedings of some of the dinners themselves have been to outsiders. Ostensibly, they were about graduation and fleeing the rig-

Joseph Milgram, Director of the Department of Orthopaedic Sur-gery (1953–1966).

Alfred Grant in 1961 studying in the Resident library. Standing behind him is Robert Rosenzweig, MD. In-set: Wallace Lehman, MD. Detail of a 1958 group portrait of attendings, residents, and interns.

1970 Beefsteak Dinner—when wives and lady friends were apparently still in attendance.


ors of training for those of genuine practice. The memories of the ambiance, the food, the camara-derie—and, later, the scathingly satirical skits—at the Copacabana, the Players Club, and other ven-ues remain coveted by many. One story cites as inspiration the 1919 fund- and fun-raising dinner at Reisenweber’s infamous restaurant on Columbus Circle, attended by some of the most outstanding orthopaedic luminaries of the time, most of whom reportedly “toasted’ the night away.”

• • •

Victor Frankel returned from Sweden in 1960, with a PhD and a lifetime passion for biomechanics, was appointed Assistant Director to Chairman Joseph Milgram, and organized the first orthopaedic bio-mechanical laboratory in the country. In 1964, he instituted the first formal course in biomechanics for residents and metropolitan-area physicians.

• • •

In response to the perceived need for a facility dedicated to the advancement of basic orthopae-dic research, including studies in chemistry, pa-thology and mechanics, in 1964 the Hospital cre-ated the Research Institute for Skeletolmuscular Diseases. Its building, on 124th Street, was dedi-cated the Harry Britenstool Memorial. The Institute was granted an annual endowment of $100,000, and Vincent Hollander, MD, PhD was appointed its Director. The building housed laboratories, veteri-nary operating rooms, and a 230-seat auditorium and was divided into three sections: Connective Tissue Chemistry, Steroid Studies, and Leukemia Studies.

Also in 1964, the Helene Fuld School of Nurs-ing established a second 15-month program for Li-censed Practical Nurses. Graduates were eligible for Registered Nurse licensure on completion of a state examination. In 1974, the school received a charter from New York State granting it the author-ity to confer the AAS (Associates) degree in nurs-ing. In 1978, having graduated more than 2000 students, the School discontinued the practical nursing program that had been in operation since 1945. James and Stephen Frauenthal (sons of Her-man, Jr.) remain Board members of the Helene Fuld College of Nursing of North General Hospital in Harlem, which still operates a distinguished pro-gram in nursing education.

During this period, the Hospital strengthened its commitment to medical specialties in addition to and related to orthopaedics, noteworthy among

them Rheumatology and RadiologyIn the 1950s, Otto Steinbrocker, MD, previously

Chief of the Arthritis Clinic at Bellevue Hospital and author of the classic text Arthritis in Modern Practice (1941) was appointed the first Chairman of the Hospital’s Department of Rheumatology. Steinbrocker’s work on reflex sympathetic dys-trophy syndrome resulted in its being renamed Steinbrocker’s syndrome. With the move to its present building in 1979, the Hospital renewed its commitment to treatment and studies in rheuma-tology, and Robert Winchester, MD assumed the position of Director of the department. A Center for Arthritis and Rheumatic Diseases was estab-lished, including the Clinical Immunology Labora-tories, supported by an endowed fellowship from the Rose Wolfson Foundation. Shortly thereafter, the Hospital was designated a National Arthritis

Center by the National Arthritis Foundation. A Plasmaphoresis Unit was created through dona-tions from Elaine and Raphael Malsin in 1980, and an additional gift from Milton Petrie became part of the Hospital’s early commitment to research in systemic lupus erythematosus. In the following decades, the Department of Rheumatology would expand to become a premier center of clinical re-search and scientist training.

With regard to radiology, Maurice Pomeranz, MD, was the Hospital’s second roentgenologist (beginning in 1924) and was succeeded by Alex Norman, MD as Chairman of the Hospital’s Depart-ment of Radiology in 1960. Each served as Presi-

dent of the New York Roentgen Society (Chapter of the New York State Radiological Society and the American College of Radiology), Pomeranz in 1944-1945 and Norman in 1983-1984, and each performed collaborative work with Henry Jaffe. Dr. Norman, best known for publications relative to Jaffe’s pioneering work in orthopaedic oncol-ogy, became world-renowned and was founder of the International Skeletal Society; he also wrote a pioneering textbook on bone radiology. In 1980, the Department could hardly have been prepared when it experienced a 90% increase (135,000 exposures) in the number of patients examined compared to projections made in 1979 at the Hos-pital’s uptown site. The move downtown was si-multaneous with a gift from the Janet and George Jaffin Foundation that permitted computerization of the Radiology Department, which greatly facili-tated patient registration, scheduling, medical re-porting, and medical indexing.

• • •

When Henry Mankin, who had complet-ed his residency at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in 1957, returned in 1966 to succeed Joseph Milgram as Chairman of Orthopaedic Surgery, he brought with him both an intimate knowledge of the Hospital and administrative experi-ence as departing Chairman of Ortho-paedic Surgery at the University of Pitts-burgh. Mankin furthermore arrived with ideas—and grants—to fuel the resident program with research opportunities and

Nurses’ Candle Ceremony. Photo circa 1957.

Henry J. Mankin, Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Sur-gery, 1966–1972, in a 2000 photo.

Residents’ impression of Henry Mankin’s breakfast conferences.

Alex Norman, MD, appointed Chairman of the Depart-ment of Radiology in 1960. From a 1979 newspaper supplement.


inspire the Department to even greater academic achievements. At the time, the Hospital had an in-formal affiliation with Mount Sinai School of Medi-cine, and some staff held academic appointments there and at other institutions. Mankin’s own illus-trious career would lead him to of the Presidency of the Orthopaedic Research Society (1969) and President of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery (1980-1981).

Soon after his appointment as Chairman, Mankin and Mount Sinai Hospital’s Chairman of Orthopaedics Robert Siffert, MD agreed to con-duct their resident/fellowship programs jointly. Henry Mankin’s tenure was noteworthy for the expansion of resident educational opportunities in other ways, including institution of a Saturday Grand Rounds and of resident breakfast confer-ences—with him—at 6:30 every weekday morn-ing (see photo on page 29). Research in the labo-ratories was conducted with Henry Jaffe and staff, in Radiology with Dr. Alex Norman, or with Mankin in his Cartilage Research Laboratory. Residents were now also required to prepare and present a clinical or research thesis. Mankin moreover decid-ed to focus on the pediatric needs at the Hospital by “jumping in” and becoming a pediatric ortho-paedic surgeon himself, with the ultimate goal of strengthening the pediatric orthopaedic unit. Leo Mayer was still active and working at the Hospital, and so Mankin had an outstanding consultant with whom to confer.

In 1972-1973 Dr. Mankin and several of his col-leagues from the Hospital and from Mount Sinai accepted offers to join the Massachusetts Gen-

eral Hospital, Mankin as Chairman of Orthopae-dic Surgery. Mankin and the others (M. Ehrlich, R. Smith, R. Leffert, and C. Weiss) would be missed for their valuable contributions to the Hospital, in-cluding their inestimable teaching. Hospital resi-dents gave Dr. Mankin a parting gift of bookends inscribed with the adage ”Give me a fish and I’ll eat for a day; teach me to fish and I’ll eat forever” in acknowledgment of the value of the education-al process they shared with him. Mankin, for his part, would always have the fondest of memories

Construction of the down-town Hospital, 1977–1979: Excavation

of the Hospital and several of his mentors and col-leagues there. In a recent interview, he said,

Joe Milgram taught me how to care for pa-tients….Manny Kaplan taught me how to do hand surgery, but he also taught me how to ask questions and when I did not know the answers, to seek an answer. Those were my heroes.

In 1972, Herman Robbins, MD succeeded Henry Mankin as Chairman of the Department of

Herman Robbins received his medical education in Europe, first at the An-derson College of Medicine in Scot-

land (1935-1939). When war broke out in Eu-rope while he was in the United States on a visit, Robbins found himself barred for a time from returning to Great Britain. Eventually he was able to transfer his course credits to the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland, from which he graduated in 1941. Robbins next ex-perienced several detours before entering the orthopaedic residency program at the Hospi-tal for Joint Diseases. His internship and ini-

tial surgical training were at Harlem Hospital on 131st Street, immediately following which he entered the Army with the rank of captain, serving as battalion surgeon in the European Theatre of Operations and accompanying the second French Army Division in the liberation of Paris. His combat service was distinguished by receipt of a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for Heroism

On his return to the United States, Robbins entered general practice in an office across the street from the Hospital, on 124th Street, although without affiliation, and later moved to 103rd Street, practicing there until he entered the Hospital’s residency program, from which he graduated in 1955.

In 1969, now a Hospital attending, Dr. Rob-bins traveled to Wrightington, England, with several colleagues, including Paul Glicksman, MD, and became one of the first Americans to observe surgery that employed Sir John Charnley’s pioneering technique for low-fric-tion arthroplasty of the hip (total hip replace-ment with high-density polyethylene socket and cemented technique). With characteristic

modesty, Dr. Robbins gives credit to Hospital orthopaedic surgeon Mark G. Lazansky, MD who had worked with Dr. Charnley for a year, as the physician most instrumental for bring-ing Charnley’s total hip surgical technique to the United States and the first in this country to perform the surgery.

Robbins published extensively on such sub-jects as procedures for congenital deformity, dislocation of the patella, glomus tumor, mold form of chronic rheumatic heart disease, and bone graft replacement. In 1975, he published a glossary of orthopaedic eponyms—signs, lines, and tests—with Michael S. Zeide, MD. In addition to his position as Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Dr. Rob-bins served as Editor of the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases and, prior to 1972, Director of Pediatrics. The Hospital’s Herman Robbins Medical Library is named in his honor. Dr. Robbins continues his passion for ortho-paedic surgery and his patients’ well-being in a practice that he shares with his son Phillip, who also completed his orthopaedic residency at the Hospital (Class of 1987).

Herman Robbins, MD Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, 1972-1981


film Funny Lady at the Rizzoli Screening Room on Fifth Avenue and 55th Street. The Annual Alumni Meeting program spoke about new beginnings similar to the promise that the prior generation of Hospital luminaries had for the new 1924 Hospi-tal.

• • •

While the Hospital’s move downtown is usually associated with the official opening of its cur-rent building in the autumn of 1979, in actuality the new Hospital for Joint Diseases Orthopaedic

Institute began many years prior, as the subject of endless discussion and debate, and ultimately momentous decisions.

In the early 1950s, when there had been discus-sion of entering into a full affiliation with Mount Sinai Hospital, the decision was made to remain a standalone specialty hospital. In 1966, the issue of moving the hospital or seeking another affilia-tion arose again, motivated by a variety of factors, including the need for greater opportunities in ad-vanced clinical and research activity to keep pace with the changes then occurring in medicine as

well as fiscal issues, such as the chronic and in-creasing difficulty of keeping orthopaedic beds filled uptown. The Board decided once again to pursue formal affiliation and initiated preliminary talks with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center, and New York Medi-cal College. Between 1967 and 1970 there were discussions with Mount Sinai regarding several types of affiliation, the most ambitious of which included the plan to build an orthopaedic pavilion on the Mount Sinai campus. By 1970, lack of prog-ress regarding construction plans with Mount Si-

Construction of the downtown Hospital, 1977–1979, as the building neared completion.

Orthopaedic Surgery, serving in that capacity un-til 1981 and guiding the Department though the Hospital’s most significant transformation in its history: the relocation to 17th Street in 1979.

• • •

In 1975 the Hospital was in the midst of planning and negotiations for a major relocation. Neither the 1980 nor the 1981 Annual Report makes mention of on a Seventy-fifth Anniversary, perhaps because everyone was preoccupied with settling into their new home. The 1975 Alumni Meeting program re-

printed the addresses delivered on the occasion of the opening of the Hospital’s new 1924 building by Henry W. Frauenthal and President of the Board Lewis Straus as well as photographs of the first, second, and third hospitals. Within five years, the Hospital would have a new home on 17th Street—a fourth edifice that would, as the others, become inextricably connected with its name and image. The 68th Annual Meeting and Dinner took place on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel with, as usual, a sumptuous repast: Filet of Beef Bordelaise fol-lowed by a private, prerelease screening of the

Construction of the downtown Hospital, 1977–1979. Far left: Initial work on the superstructure. Left: Willard Loeb Auditorium.

nai set in motion the exploration of development options further downtown, and by 1973 Mount Sinai and the Hospital concluded their formal dis-cussions.

Between 1973 and 1974, talks were held with Beth Israel Medical Center that resulted in the agreement that the Hospital for Joint Diseases would become the orthopaedic provider for Beth Israel, with the latter providing necessary general medical access to and provision for the Hospital’s orthopaedic patients and the former providing a new building. In 1974 the State Board of Health


Above: Illustrations from the supplement to the New York Times announcing the new Hospital building. Note the placement of Loeb Auditorium (relocated during construction.)

Right: Private room in the new Hospital

granted preliminary approval for the plan, archi-tects were engaged, and the purchase price of land was determined. In 1976, while discussions were still in progress, the Gramercy Park commu-nity expressed concern when it was made public that another hospital would be constructed nearby in the mainly residential area next to the sprawling Beth Israel complex. These and other concerns of the difficult process of bringing a new hospital into downtown Manhattan were eventually allayed with the help of public officials such as Mayor Ed Koch and Senator Jacob Javits.

Groundbreaking for the downtown site took place on February 3, 1977. Throughout 1978 con-

struction of the new Hospital for Joint Diseases Orthopaedic Institute progressed uneventfully, with the exception of some small problems, such the need to carve out of the lobby an auditorium that had inadvertently slipped away from the archi-tectural plan.

On July 25, 1978, New York Governor Hugh Carey gave the principle address at ceremonies in which he placed a time capsule inside the corner-stone containing documents concerning the Hos-pital’s history. Dignitaries of the new Hospital for Joint Diseases Orthopaedic Institute, Beth Israel Medical Center, and Mount Sinai Medical Center were in attendance. Among those representing

New York Governor Hugh Carey speaking at the Dedication cer-emonies, July 25, 1978.

the Hospital were President Paul Kohnstamm, past President Alfred Rice, Executive Director Har-vey Machaver, Chairman of the Building Commit-tee Bernard Aronson, Chairman of the Develop-ment Committee George M. Jaffin, Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery Herman Robbins, MD, and Robbins’s predecessor Henry Mankin, MD.

The Hospital’s new building, which for the first time housed all its clinical, teaching, and research facilities, was dedicated on September 19, 1979 as the Samuel H. Golding Building, in grateful rec-ognition of Golding’s gift that had been essential to its realization. Samuel Golding, a prominent fig-

Cover of the supplement to the New York Times an-nouncing the new Hospital building.

ure in New York’s, real estate, banking, and phil-anthropic communities, was not only a long-time Trustee of Beth Israel Medical Center but also a founder of the Albert Einstein College of Medi-cine. A special 12-page color supplement to the New York Times, which hailed “A New National Center for Orthopaedics,” included a of cutaway drawing of the Hospital showing its facilities and an introduction to the Hospital’s physicians and administrators.


1980 ~ 2005The hospital entered its fourth quarter-cen-

tury with a new building at a new location, a revitalized staff—and equally important,

with an illustrious history and rich traditions upon which to grow. The next 25 years would be in many ways a period of unprecedented change in chal-lenging and often difficult times.—a period when the Hospital would once again prove its resiliency and achieve levels of accomplishment befitting its past.

The Hospital had focused on the treatment of children from its inception and had become renowned for pioneering the admission and or-thopaedic treatment of infants from birth to four years of age. Surgeons who treated clubfoot, po-lio, scoliosis, and tubercular joints in children at the turn of the century were skilled practitioners of the “strap and buckle” method of orthopaedics, lacking as they did the tools and techniques that specialists benefit from today. The early Hospital’s pioneers and the several generations of surgeons who followed—Samuel Kleinberg, Charlie Hanish, Leo Mayer, Barnard Kleiger, Emanuel Kaplan, Hen-ry Milch, Joseph Milgram, Henry Mankin, Herman Robbins, and others—are rightly counted among

those who defined the subspecialty of pediatric orthopaedics.

Just before the Hospital moved to 17th Street in 1979, two former residents accepted the invita-tion of Chairman of Orthopaedic Surgery Herman Robbins to join the Faculty as the core of a new De-

partment of Pediatric Orthopaedics to be formed at the downtown site. One, Wallace B. Lehman, MD (Resident class of 1962), practiced at Long Island Jewish Hospital as well as Soroka Hospi-tal in Beer Sheva, Israel before being appointed Medical Director and Chief of the Department of

Orthopaedic Surgery at Alyn-Or-thopaedic Hospital in Jerusalem. Lehman accepted the new post of Director of Pediatric Orthopae-dics at the Hospital for Joint Dis-eases and developed a renowned program for the treatment of club-foot. The other resident, Alfred D. Grant, MD (class of 1961), was in private practice and working with a multidisciplinary program in neuromuscular disorders at the Albert Einstein School of Medi-cine as well as Medical Director of

the uptown Hospital’s Muscular Dystrophy Clinic and First Chance Child Development School. Dr. Grant fondly remembers how First Chance “took over” a small building in Mount Morris Park that had been used by the City to store sports equip-ment and turned it into a school to teach disabled children—not reading or writing or arithmetic, but behaviors that other children develop as a matter of course: to sit up, stand up, recognize language, and develop a sense of their surroundings. This type of education/treatment plan for developmen-tally disabled children was the first of its kind ever undertaken in the field of orthopaedics.

When Grant accepted the invitation to join the downtown Hospital full-time, he brought with him the nucleus of a neuromuscular and developmen-tal pediatrics program, a team that formed the new Center for the Neuromuscular and Devel-opmentally Disabled, including Isaac Pinter, MD as the Center’s psychologist. When the Center moved to the downtown Hospital, it drew upon the expertise of specialists in over twenty disci-plines—including developmental pediatrics, gen-eral pediatrics, genetics, genetic counseling, early childhood education, special education, physical and occupational therapy, and psychology—and provided a model for multidisciplinary pediatric care at other orthopaedic institutions. Both Dr. Lehman and Dr. Grant were later recipients of the Frauenthal Medal for their contributions to the field of pediatric orthopaedics, particularly in club-foot and neuromuscular care, and to the Hospital; Grant remains Director of the Center for Skeletal

Dysplasias and Growth Disorders and is Director Emeritus of the Center for the Neuromuscular and Developmentally Disabled.

In 2003, the Hospital would open a premiere Center for Children under the direction of David S. Feldman, MD. A centerpiece of the Center for Children is its child- and parent-friendly interior design, including a dedicated elevator to its floors and a unique flow of interior space that allows one to view through areas, the antithesis of traditional hospital pediatric settings of contained rooms and small enclosures. The Center was built at a cost of $10 million realized through a concerted five-year fundraising plan and owing to the generosity of many people, most particularly Elly and Steve Hammerman, and the support of KIDS New York.

Pediatric orthopaedic and neurological condi-tions are in fact now treated in four Centers of Excellence in the Hospital: the Wallace B. Lehm-an, MD Center for Pediatric Orthopaedic Surgery (which includes the Center for Child and Adoles-cent Sports Medicine, Fractures, and Clubfoot as well as the Ebers Center for Foot Deformity); the Elly Hammerman Center for the Treatment of Neuromuscular Disorders; the New York Institute for Limb Lengthening and Reconstruction; and the Center for Pediatric Rehabilitation and Pediat-ric Medicine. Among them, the Hospital’s centers address both simple and complex orthopaedic conditions, including spinal disorders, growth dis-orders, limb length inequalities, and bone health disorders, as well as neuromuscular and rheumat-ic disorders.

• • •

In 1983 a unique ergonomics program, the Occu-pational and Industrial Orthopaedic Center (OIOC), was established by Department of Orthopaedic Surgery Chairman Victor Frankel and Margareta Nordin, DrSci, CIE, OIOC’s Director since its in-ception. OIOC staff perform clinical analyses of workplace injuries and conditions affecting worker health as well as serving as a research and educa-tion center, offering a course in ergonomics and biomechanics at the NYU Graduate School Arts and Sciences. Housed originally in the Hospital,

The Center for Children, opened in 2003, follows a long Hospital tradi-tion of providing not only cutting-edge treatment but compassionate care as well.

Long-time Hospital benefactors Alan H. Kempner (seat-ed) and George Jaffin (right) with Director Emeritus of Orthopaedic Surgery Joseph Milgram, MD. Photo 1981.


in 1991 OIOC was able, through a generous grant from the Harry J. Reicher Foundation, to move to a standalone facility in Greenwich Village, where its facilities were expanded to a fully integrated unit consisting of a comprehensive clinic, an NYU-affiliated postgraduate program, and research and consultation services. Ever since, OIOC has focused on developing evidence-based clinical programs and industry contracts that can return patients—predominantly those with back inju-ries—to a full, active life and to the workforce. OIOC has also successfully integrated research evidence into its clinical care program, employing a multidisciplinary team that includes a physician, a psychologist, a physical therapist, and ergono-mists. Dr. Nordin is coauthor, with Victor Frankel,

of Basic Biomechanics of the Skeletal System (1980), now in its third edition.

• • •

One of the most revolutionary—and fascinating—surgical techniques ever championed by Hospital for Joint Diseases orthopaedists is the Ilizarov limb-lengthening technique introduced to North America by Victor Frankel in the 1980s. Attempts at lengthening injured or congenitally shortened limbs go back at least to the late nineteenth cen-tury. In the early 1930s, Hospital for Joint Dis-eases resident Edward J. Haboush, MD published results of studies on the subject that were con-sidered ahead of their time. It was Gavril Ilizarov, however, who after World War II ultimately solved the problem of how to mechanically stimulate and control new growth in long bones.

Gavril A. Ilizarov, MD, PhD, DSc (1921-1992) was born in the isolated mountain village of Dagestan, Russia, on the Caspian sea. After attending medi-cal school, he set up practice in the Kurgan region of western Siberia, where he was the only phy-sician for hundreds of square miles. When faced with the problem of treating thousands of World War II veterans suffering from limb-threatening unhealed fractures and infections, he discovered it was possible to stimulate bone growth by the principle of fractional distraction, or pulling apart, of bone segments, not just by using compression, as had previously been believed. Building on this paradigm, Ilizarov created external fixation devic-es in the 1950s that allow the correction of bone deformities and promote healing in fracture non-

unions; it also represented a new treatment for complications of osteomyelitis.

At a biomechanics meeting in Barcelona in 1984, Victor Frankel observed Ilizarov’s external fixator technology for the first time. In 1986, Fran-kel traveled to Kurgan to learn how to use Ilizarov’s apparatus directly from the inventor and subse-quently introduced the technology to the United States. To aid him in this undertaking, he invited Vladimir Golyakhovsky, MD, PhD, DSc, an expert in the procedure who was trained in Russia, to join the Hospital staff. Frankel was the first to perform surgery in the United States using this technique, and Alfred Grant was the first to perform a pediat-ric Ilizarov procedure in this country.

In 1987, an International Conference on the Ilizarov method held in New York and sponsored by the Hospital was held with a prestigious inter-national faculty headed by Dr. Ilizarov and includ-ing physicians from Italy who had introduced his method to Western Europe. Today the Hospital’s Center for Children includes the largest clinic in the country applying Ilizarov’s techniques, the New York Institute for Limb Lengthening and Re-construction, whose long-term treatment goals in the management of limb length inequalities and upper and lower extremity deformities are to im-prove function, decrease stability, and prevent or forestall arthritis in children.

• • •

In 1989, the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries was established under the direction of Donald J. Rose, MD, to provide specialized and affordable

healthcare to the dance community. Dr. Rose and Board of Trustees member (now Chairman) William A. Perlmuth proposed a collaboration between the Hospital for Joint Diseases and the Harkness Foundation for Dance that would build an integrat-ed program of clinical services, education, and re-search, creating a dance medicine center staffed by a team of multidisciplinary professionals well-versed in the health needs, performance, and fi-nancial issues faced by many of the dance com-munity. Philanthropic support from the Jacob and Baleria Langeloth Foundation and the LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust were important to the en-dowment of the Special Assistance Fund, created to ensure injured dancers could receive treatment regardless of ability to pay.

The Center’s clinical services represent an im-portant contribution to the dance community and the lives of young dancers; its education program helps to ensure the future health of the dance community; and its research program includes the Human Performance Laboratory—one of only twelve systems like it in the world—that allows the analysis of muscle and joint forces experi-enced by dancers while they are dancing.

• • •

The Hospital’s mission—indeed, the mission of any hospital that aspires to greatness—includes three indispensable components: patient care, education, and research. The three are inextricably connected; each supports the others. Central to the mission of the Hospital for Joint Diseases ever since its found-ing has been orthopaedic research: the search to discover devices, techniques, and substances that have the promise to eradicate or at least ameliorate conditions that afflict millions worldwide.

In 1996, the Department of Orthopaedic Sur-gery’s research arm, the Department of Bioengi-neering, was reorganized as the Musculoskeletal Research Center, with Paul E. Di Cesare, MD ap-pointed its Director. Under the leadership of Dr. Di Cesare, the focus of the Center’s research has shifted to keep up with the tides of change sweep-ing medical research everywhere through the ad-dition of a strong molecular biology and cellular bi-ology component in addition to animal models of human disease and biomechanical engineering.

The Center also plays a key role in resident edu-cation by providing guidance and support for resi-

dent research projects as well as by directly su-pervising two residents who each year complete a full- time research fellowship in the Center.

Since its inception the Center has generated over $8 million dollars in funding, including several prestigious grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Arthritis Foundation, and the Ortho-paedic and Educational Research Foundation. With the ability to perform studies in a wide variety of subdisciplines ranging from biomechanical analy-ses to genetic engineering, the Musculoskeletal Research Center, with its team approach to tack-ling musculoskeletal disorders, stands uniquely positioned to add valuable contributions to ortho-paedic research.

Margareta Nordin, DrSci, CIE, Director of the Occupa-tional and Industrial Orthopaedic Center

Technician at work in the Musculoskeletal Research Center.

Testing in the Human Performance Laboratory, Hark-ness Center for Dance Injuries.


• • •

The events of September 11, 2001 were a test for the Hospital’s resources as well as for those of lo-cal police and firefighters and everyone else who responded to the catastrophe. One of the first or-ders of business was to generate “surge capac-ity”—to implement the capability of taking care of more patients than the number of empty beds in the Hospital. The emergency preparedness opera-tions of the Hospital were put into operation im-mediately, and the lobby and plaza were organized for admission of many more patients than actually arrived.

Soon after patients began arriving at hospitals, NYU Downtown Hospital’s overwhelming patient situation was struck with another devastating cir-cumstance: it lost its water supply, and thus was no longer able to sterilize surgical instruments. The Hospital immediately instituted a series of van shuttles to and from NYU Downtown to de-liver sterile equipment and retrieve their used in-

struments for sterilization. In the end, the Hospital had somewhat more than 20 admissions redirect-ed from NYU Downtown and treated and released approximately an additional 55 patients, many of them for cuts and hand injuries.

• • •

During the 1980s Robert Winchester, MD built a modern Department of Rheumatology and recruit-ed a faculty of outstanding clinicians and scien-tists who brought international prominence to the Hospital. Among those recruited and trained in the Hospital’s research laboratories were molecular biologists Drs. Jack Silver, Parvin Merryman, and Peter Gregersen. Clinical investigators included Drs. Gary Solomon, Jill Buyon, Sicy Lee, and Harry Shen. Major discoveries during that period includ-ed one of the seminal findings in rheumatology,

Howard Rosen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from New York University in 1944 and re-ceived his medical degree in 1947 from

NYU School of Medicine, where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical honor society. He next received his orthopaedic training at the Hospital (Resident class of 1952).

Early on, Rosen developed an interest in the problems of fractures that fail to heal. Toward this end, in 1960 he traveled to Switzerland to study with Maurice Müller, a founding member of the renowned Arbeitgemeinschaft für Osteosynthe-sefragen (Association for the Study of Internal Fixation, commonly abbreviated AO) and a leading proponent of AO techniques. When he returned to

ing his tenure at the Hospital, his reputation as a national and international lecturer continuously grew, as did the affection of his colleagues,

Over 70 academic articles and 400 documented educational contributions remain part of Howard Rosen’s academic and teaching legacy. His con-tributions to dissemination of the AO principles of internal fixation not only earned him distinction in this country but also in Switzerland and with American and Swiss veterinary medical societies. In 1985, the International Board of Trustees of the AO Foundation honored him with full member-ship. He was instrumental in making it possible for six residents of the Hospital to attend the AO Basic Fracture Course annually.

A master surgeon-educator, erudite, slight of build and debonair in appearance with his signa-ture handlebar mustache, Howard Rosen was a committed academic orthopaedic surgeon of the highest caliber and was honored with the first Frauenthal Medal in 1994 at the Hospital for Joint Diseases Founders Gala. He remains a well-re-membered and honored friend of the Hospital and its staff.

the United States, Rosen brought with him Mül-ler/AO methods, implants, and instruments.

Howard Rosen’s legacy is assured through his introduction of the AO system to the medi-cal community in this country. With his extensive experience and surgical talents, he established a wide-ranging reputation for his expert handling of complex problem fractures, in partial recognition of which he was appointed the Chief of the Frac-ture Service at the Hospital in 1981. Upon the aca-demic affiliation of the Hospital with New York Uni-versity Medical Center in 1994, he was appointed Clinical Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery.

While outstanding surgical skills do not neces-sarily reside side-by-side with great teaching skills, in Howard Rosen they not only coincided but seemed to enhance his ability to reach, through his teaching, so many residents and fellows. He knew the toughest roads in fracture management. He had performed the cases that most only knew about from books and articles. He was an accom-plished surgeon, and his method of presentations was articulate, even humorous: he had the envi-able ability to explain the application of principles of treatment in the simplest possible terms. Dur-

Howard Rosen, MD Surgeon and Teacher Extraordinaire

Steven Abramson, MD, Chairman of the Hospital’s Department of Rheumatology.

Initiative for Women with Disabilities

In 1997, an innovative program that would eventually become the Initiative for Women with

Disabilities was implemented at the Hospital to provide women with disabilities access to primary medical and gynecological care as well to present as free lectures on health education. The program was expanded in 1998 through the gen-erosity of Elly Hammerman, and in 2001 a suite was dedicated as the Initiative for Women with Disabili-ties/Elly and Steve Hammerman Health and Wellness Center. The Center, the first of its kind in New York City, is a multidisciplinary re-source to empower women to pur-sue healthy lifestyles and to pro-mote prevention of osteoporosis, heart disease, and musculoskeletal pain in a population that might oth-erwise experience delayed medi-cal care for any of several reasons. The Initiative for Women with Dis-abilities has to date assisted more than 5000 clients to achieve their goals and receive both medical and fitness care.

Hospital staff attending to a victim of September 11.


the discovery of the gene that dispose people to rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatology researchers at the Hospital also made significant discoveries surrounding the unusual form of arthritis that oc-curs in patients with AIDS.

Throughout the 1980s there were essentially two programs of rheumatology, one at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, the other at New York Univer-sity. In 1986, the Fellowship training programs at the two institutions were merged. In 1990, Steven B. Abramson, MD was appointed Chairman of the Hospital’s Department of Rheumatology. In 2000, Dr. Abramson succeeded Dr. Gerald Weissmann, world-renowned Chairman of the NYU Division of Rheumatology, formally uniting the Rheumatology programs at the two institutions.

Since 2000, the Department, whose adminis-tration and much of its laboratory facilities are at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, has expanded its research and full-time clinical staff. Between 2000 and 2005 the Department has produced outstand-ing research, received several major grants, devel-oped one of the finest and largest programs of rheumatology physician-scientists in the country, and been a great source of pride for the Hospital for Joint Diseases and New York University Medi-cal Center. Bringing physicians into the program and giving them the tools and knowledge to be-come leaders in the field is one of the missions of the Department, as evidenced by the fact that sixteen former and present Chiefs of Rheumatol-ogy at other institutions have been trained in the Department’s program. Three Department mem-

bers have been recipients of the Frauenthal Medal (see page 45).

The Department’s research and clinical pro-grams have led to the establishment of the Cen-ter for Arthritis and Autoimmunity, led by Solomon and Stephen Smiles, MD, and the Osteoporosis Center, led by Stephen Honig, MD. Investiga-tors in the Department have received increasing recognition in the area of translational research

in both autoimmune diseases and osteoarthritis. Major discoveries, particularly in the area of sys-temic lupus erythematosus by Drs. Jill Buyon and Michael Belmont have led to the establishment of the NYU-HJD Center for Lupus Research in 2005, directed by Dr. Buyon.

In 2004 the Department established the Peter D. Seligman Center for Advanced Therapeutics, made possible through a generous gift from Rob-

Victor Frankel graduated from Swarthmore College in 1946 and from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1951. He

completed his orthopaedic residency at the Hos-pital for Joint Diseases (Resident class of 1958), where he was the first resident to be awarded a scholarship grant by the Pfizer Company, in 1956. On graduating from the Hospital’s residency pro-gram, he was awarded two year’s funding (via a Henry W. Frauenthal Travel Scholarship and a March of Dimes Fellowship) to pursue his inter-est in biophysical measurement at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, where he earn a doctorate in orthopaedic biomechanics under scientist and surgeon Carl Hirsch, MD, PhD. Decades later, in 1992, Sweden would honor Victor Frankel’s work in orthopaedic biomechanics with the Royal Order of the Polar Star (KNO), by decree of King Carl XVI

Gustaf, “for scientific and literary pursuits that contribute to society-at-large.”

Upon completing his doctoral studies, Frankel established the first orthopaedic biomechanical laboratory in the United States at the Hospital, where he performed studies, taught, and orga-nized courses. These were uncharted waters, and he was making clear the urgency that biomechan-ics was essential to inform and improve orthopae-dic treatment, research, and education. In 1965, he was selected as an ABC Travelling Fellow by the American Orthopaedic Association, spending six weeks visiting orthopaedic centers throughout Great Britain. In 1966, he joined the faculty of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Case West-ern Reserve University in Cleveland. In 1975 he accepted the Chairmanship of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Washing-ton in Seattle.

Dr. Frankel returned to the Hospital in 1981 to assume the post of Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. With his boundless en-thusiasm for advancing orthopaedics and excep-tional devotion to the Hospital, he revitalized the Department’s goals, improved resident education, and established the Occupational and Industrial Orthopaedic Center under the able direction of Margareta Nordin, DrSci. He supported a con-structive relationship with the New York University Medical Center and NYU’s School of Medicine that enabled the Hospital to enrich its academic and

research programs. He brought the revolutionary Ilizarov bone distraction technique to the United States from Russia, performing the first surgery of this type in North America at the Hospital in 1986. Frankel fostered the development of addi-tional postgraduate fellowship programs and es-tablished a full-time hospital-based academic fac-ulty based upon the subspecialties in orthopaedic surgery. He launched a multifaceted research pro-gram by establishing the Hospital’s Department of Bioengineering in 1981, which in 1996 was recon-stituted as the Musculoskeletal Research Center. In conjunction William F. Enneking, Professor and Chairman of Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Florida, Frankel founded the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, now the world’s largest bone bank.

When his tenure as Chairman ended in 1994 with the appointment of Joseph D. Zuckerman, MD, to that position, Victor Frankel continued to serve as President and Co-Chief Executive Offi-cer. In this role with Reuven Savitz and the Board, he was a leader in restoring the Hospital to fiscal stability during financially stressful times.

One of Victor Frankel’s favorite articles of mem-orabilia is an illustration of those orthopaedists who have been his teachers—and their teachers, and so on. Not unrelated is one of Victor Frankel’s greatest legacies: the residents who graduated during his tenure and afterward at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, who have inherited it all.

Victor H. Frankel, MD Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, 1981–1994

Hijinks at a 1980s Beefsteak Dinner. Hospital luminaries include Melvin Jahss (standing second from left), Execu-tive Director Harvey Machaver (standing third from left), Margaret Nordin (standing at far right), Allan Strongwa-ter (seated at left), Howard Rosen (seated second from right), and Victor Frankel (seated at far right).


ert and Bonnie Koenigsberg. The Seligman Cen-ter brings state-of-the-art basic research develop-ments to the clinical care of patients. The focus of the Center is on several diseases, including lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic ar-thritis, osteoarthritis, and Sjögren’s syndrome. It is a site for numerous nationally conducted trials and is staffed by physicians directly involved in the development of protocols for testing the effective-ness of cutting-edge investigational therapies.

• • •

When Victor Frankel was appointed Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery in 1981, his most important priority was to broaden the clinical, educational, and research activities of the Department. Based upon his experiences at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Washington, he established a full-time hospital-based faculty that, working closely with the large number of part-time voluntary faculty, enhanced the Department’s productivity. The initial mem-bers of the hospital-based group were Wallace B. Lehman, MD and Alfred D. Grant, MD. Mark I. Pitman, MD (Resident class of 1961) joined shortly afterward, following a mid-career fellow-ship in Sports Medicine in Sweden. In 1982, Ste-ven A. Stuchin, MD also joined the faculty as a joint replacement and hand specialist along with Neil Kahanowitz, MD, a spine specialist. In 1984, the group was enlarged with the addition of three new members, including Joseph D. Zuckerman,

Blair, John E.: Bacteriology: The Coagulase Reaction for the Identification of Pathogenic Staphylococci. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1946 April; 7: 82-83.

Buchman, Joseph, and John E. Blair: Report on the Use of Penicillin in the Treatment of Staphylococ-cal Infections with Special Reference to Acute and Chronic Osteomyelitis and Several Collateral Studies. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1945 October; 6: 114-125.

Buchman, Joseph: A Survey of Progress in the Under-standing of the Osteomyelitic Lesion and its Ther-apy. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1957 April; 18: 60-85.

Caffey, John: Famililial Hyperphosphatasemia with Atel-iosis and Hypermetabolism of Growing Membra-nous Bone; Review of the Clinical, Radiographic and Chemical Features. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1972 October; 33: 81-110.

Frankel, Victor H.: Biomechanics of Proximal Femoral Fractures. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1963 October; 24, 110-118.

Giddings, Daniel S.: Osteotomy of the Spine for Marie-Strumpell Arthritis. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1946 April; 7: 35-42.

Goldenberg, Raphael R.: Neoplasia in Paget’s Disease of Bone. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1961 April; 22: 1-38.

Herzmark, Maurice H.: Bone Changes in Caisson Dis-ease. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1942 October; 3: 128-133.

Jaffe, Henry L.: Aneurysmal Bone Cyst. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1950 April; 2: 3-13.

Jaffe, Henry L.: Benign Osteoblastoma. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1956 October; 17: 141-151.

Jaffe, Henry L.: Intracortical Osteogenic Sarcoma. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1960 October; 21: 189-197.

Jaffe, Henry L.: Juxtacortical Chondroma. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1956 April; 17: 20-29.

Jaffe, Henry L.: The Problem of Ewing Sarcoma of Bone, Bull. Hosp. Joint Disease. 1945; 6, 82-85.

Jaffe, Henry L. and Louis Lichtenstein: Giant-Cell Tu-mor of Bone. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1941 July; 2: 95-104.

Jaffe, Henry L. and Louis Lichtenstein: Synovial Sarco-ma (Synovioma). Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1941 Janu-ary; 2: 3-10.

Jaffe, Henry L.: Aneurysmal Bone Cyst. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1950 April; 2: 3-13.

Jaffe, Henry: Giant Cell Tumor of Bone: Problems of Differential Diagnosis. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1944 October; 5: 84-91.

Jaffe, Henry L.: Intracortical Osteogenic Sarcoma. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1960 October; 21: 189-197.

Jaffe, William L. and Charnley, John: Bilateral Charnley Low-Friction Arthroplasty as a Single Operative Procedure: A Report of Fifty Cases. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1971 October; 32: 198-214.

Johnston, Austin D.: Clinical Problems in Osteoid-Oste-oma. Evidence of Osteoclastic Aversion to Oste-oid. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1962 October; 23: 80-94.

Kanfer, Alfred and Casten, Daniel F.: Observations on Disturbances in Neuromuscular Coordination in Patients with Malignant Disease. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1958 April; 19: 1-19.

Kaplan, Emanuel B.: Muscular and Tendinous Variations of the Flexor Superficialis of the Fifth Finger of the Hand. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1969 April; 30: 59-67.

Kaplan, Emanuel B.: Replacement of an Amputated Middle Metacarpal and Finger by Transposition of the Index Finger. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1966 Octo-ber; 27: 103-108.

Kaplan, Emanuel B.: Translation of Gantzer’s Thesis in Muscular Variations. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1969 Oc-tober; 30: 191-198.

Kaplan, Emanuel B.: Anatomy: the Iliotibial Band. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1946 April; 7: 84-86.

Kaplan, Emanuel B.: Surgical Treatment of Spastic Hy-perextension of the Proximal Interphalangeal

Joints of the Fingers Accompanied by Flexion of the Distal Phalanges. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1962 April; 23: 35-39.

Kleiger, Barnard: The Significance of the Tibiotalar Navic-ular Complex in Congenital Club Foot. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1962 October; 23: 158-169.

Kleinberg, Samuel: The Transplantation of the Adductor Longus I its Entirety to Supplement the Quadri-ceps Femoris. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1957 April; 18: 117-122.

Mankin, Henry J. , Revak, Conrad and Lippiello, Louis: Ribonucleic Acid Synthesis in the Epiphyseal Plate of the Rat: An Auto-Radiographic Study. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1968 October; 29: 111-118.

Milch, Henry: The Rationale of the Abduction Osteot-omy. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1941 October; 2: 154-164.

Milch, Henry: Resection Angulation of the Femur for Redemption of the Hip Joint. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1957 April; 18: 45-50.

Milgram, Joseph E.: Congenital Forward Shoulders (Quadrupedal Type): Treatment by Clavicular Oste-otomy. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1942 July; 3: 93-96.

Norman, Alex and Bullough, Peter: The Radiolucent Crescent Line: An Early Diagnostic Sign of Avas-cular Necrosis of the Femoral Head. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1963 April; 24: 99-104.

Silver, Carol M.: Pelvic Bone Changes Following Supra-pubic Prostatectomy. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1941 January; 2: 10-20.

Smith, Richard J.: Boutonniere Deformity of the Fingers. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1966 April; 27: 27-38.

Smith, Richard: The relationship of Lymphatics to Bone, Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1960 April; 21: 25-41.

Sutro, Charles J.: Experimental Production of a Rapid-Type of Osteoarthritis in Rabbits: Carborundum Granules as the Intra-articular Irritant. Bull Hosp Joint Dis 1962 April; 23: 20-26.

Classic papers from the Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases

The Bulletin of the Hospital for Joint Diseases, first published in 1940, is in 2005 in its sixty-fifth year of continuous publication. Its Editors-in-Chief

have been Samuel Kleinberg (1940–1957), Leo Mayer (1957–1960), Emanu-

el Kaplan (1961–1978), Herman Robbins (1979–1991), Victor Frankel (1991–1996), and William Jaffe (1997–present). Several contributions have come to be considered classics of the orthopaedic literature, including the following.

MD, who would later succeed Victor Frankel as Department Chairman.

The emphasis on resident education increased throughout the 1980s. A year-round didactic pro-gram was instituted, including morning presen-tations five days a week, which involved active participation of all staff. By the end of the 1980s, the Hospital’s Orthopaedic Residency Program was being recognized as a competitive and highly sought-after training program.

With the addition of more faculty, the Depart-ment’s current organization (see page 48) began to take shape. Chiefs were appointed for each of the nine subspecialty areas of orthopaedic surgery: hand surgery (Martin Posner), adult reconstruc-tive surgery (William Jaffe, Frederick Jaffe), spine surgery (Neil Kahanowitz), sports medicine (Mark Pitman), orthopaedic oncology (David Present), pediatric orthopaedics (Wallace Lehman, Alfred Grant), shoulder and elbow (Joseph Zuckerman), foot and ankle (Melvin Jahss), and trauma/fracture (Kenneth Koval).

When the Hospital moved to its downtown lo-cation, it was understood that it would enter into a clinical affiliation with nearby Beth Israel Medical Center and continue its academic affiliation with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine that had been established in the 1950s. All orthopaedic proce-dures that had previously been performed at Beth Israel Medical Center were to be transferred to the Hospital, while nighttime and weekend proce-dures—primarily emergency cases—were to be performed at Beth Israel, with HJD orthopaedic

Recipients of the Frauenthal Medal

1994 Howard Rosen, MD1995 Alfred Grant, MD1996 Victor Frankel, MD1997 Joseph Zuckerman, MD1999 Wallace Lehman, MD2000 Stephen Abramson, MD2001 Martin Posner, MD2002 William Jaffe, MD and Jill Buyon, MD2003 Nate Bondi, MD2004 Gary Solomon, MD

The Frauenthal Medal

The Frauenthal Medal, first awarded in 1994, is presented annually to a mem-ber of the medical staff in recognition

of his or her outstanding contributions to the Hospital in the tradition of its founders, Henry and Herman Frauenthal.


staff and residents providing coverage for these as well as other Beth Israel Emergency Room cas-es; Beth Israel, in turn, would provide a full range of medical support services for the Hospital. The concept was that the hospitals together would represent a full-service medical center, with ortho-paedics focused at the Hospital for Joint Diseases. Although this approach was utilized through the mid-1980s, it was often an uneasy relationship. At the same time, HJD was dissatisfied with its aca-demic affiliation with Mount Sinai School of Medi-cine—a limited affiliation at best, as Mount Sinai’s location far uptown did not encourage the synergy necessary to enhance the academic mission of

the Hospital. When it became clear that a change in academic affiliation would be beneficial, Victor Frankel sought to develop such a relationship with New York University School of Medicine. Follow-ing discussions with NYU’s Orthopaedic Chair Ted Waugh and Dean Saul Farber, an academic affilia-tion was established in 1986; at the same time the Hospital’s affiliation with Mount. Sinai School of Medicine was ended. The change, while inevitable and in the best interests of the Hospital, predict-ably had a negative impact on its relationship with Beth Israel, which was also an academic affiliate of Mount Sinai, and by 1988 HJD ended its affiliation with Beth Israel Medical Center. This required the Hospital to provide a full complement of medical and consultative services, which it was able to do. By 1988, HJD had become a freestanding institu-tion specializing in musculoskeletal disorders.

In 1988, in a significant administrative change, HJD Executive Director Harvey Machaver was re-placed by Reuven Savitz, who assumed the po-sition of Executive Vice-President; at the same time the Board of Trustees appointed Victor Fran-kel President of the Hospital while allowing him to retain his post as Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Under this restructured leadership, the Hospital implemented widespread changes in response to the altered landscape of healthcare in New York State. Since a large portion of orthopaedic surgery had become ambulatory, it was no longer feasible to fill a 200-bed hospital with acute care orthopaedic patients. In response,

the Hospital established a Diagnostically Related Group–exempt rehabilitation program that over time would grow to a maximum of 76 beds and a neurosciences program, focusing on the evalua-tion and treatment of epilepsy, that included neu-rosurgical and neurophysiological components. The epilepsy program would in particular prove successful, and in 1996 it moved to its present location at NYU Medical Center.

The 1990s were a challenging time for hospi-tals, particularly in New York City. The growth of managed healthcare and the already restrictive healthcare financing environment in New York State placed further strains on all hospitals, partic-ularly specialty institutions. The diversification rep-resented by the new programs that had been es-tablished at the Hospital in the late 1980s became particularly important to its success. Changes in healthcare financing also led to a proliferation of hospital mergers, both locally and nationwide. Fol-lowing this trend, the Hospital and NYU Medical Center entered into discussions to establish a for-mal administrative relationship in addition to their academic affiliation. As a result of these efforts, in May 1994 the Hospital for Joint Diseases became a Sponsored Organization of NYU Medical Center. Although the hospital continued to operate under its own charter, it did so under the administrative umbrella of NYU Medical Center. The goal initially was to consolidate administrative functions and ultimately to integrate clinical programs. In the years following the initial agreement, a gradual

integration of the administrative functions of the two institutions took place, resulting in significant benefits for both institutions and enhancing the ability of both to succeed in a formidable health-care environment.

The leadership of the Department of Orthopae-dic Surgery changed once again in the early 1990s. In 1993, Victor Frankel announced that he would step down as Chairman at the end of that year. A search committee was established, and Joseph D. Zuckerman, MD was appointed the next Chair, effective January 1, 1994. Shortly afterward, the agreement with NYU Medical Center went into ef-fect, a key term of which was to seek integration of the two institution’s Departments of Orthopae-dic Surgery. Following the retirement of NYU Or-thopaedics Chairman Ted Waugh in 1996, a search committee selected Dr. Zuckerman as Chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at NYU Medical Center, a position he assumed in August 1997. With a single Chair of the two departments, the goal of full integration could now be realized. The NYU–Hospital for Joint Diseases Department of Orthopaedic Surgery was formally established that same year. Today, the department represents one of the largest in the country, with 120 faculty members providing care at five institutions—the Hospital for Joint Diseases, NYU Medical Center’s Tisch Hospital, Bellevue Hospital Center, the Vet-erans Affairs Medical Center, and Jamaica Hospi-tal Medical Center—and performing over 16,000 operative procedures annually. The residency pro-

grams at the Hospital and NYU School of Medi-cine were also merged into a single, comprehen-sive education program with twelve residents per year, representing the largest such program in the country. The organization of the Department is based on the different clinical sites as well as the subspecialty services: a Chief presides over each of the nine subspecialty services serving the five constituent hospital centers, and there is further-more a Chief of Orthopaedic Services at each site. This administrative organization has been central in sustaining the growth of the clinical, education-al, and research activities of the Department.

The relationship with NYU Medical Center that was formally established in 1994 has flourished ever since. When NYU merged with Mount Sinai Medical Center in the late 1990s, the Hospital was a part of that merger. Although the NYU–Mount Sinai merger did not fulfill expectations, the rela-tionship between NYU and HJD has grown stron-ger since 1994. The success of that relationship led to further discussions on ways to enhance the integration. In 2003, after consideration of sev-eral options, the decision was made to pursue a full-asset merger between the two institutions, a decision endorsed by both Boards of Trustees. Accomplishing this merger required the efforts and expertise of many individuals. Key roles have been played by Robert Glickman, MD, Dean and Chief Executive Officer of NYU Medical Center; Richard Donaghue, Senior Vice-President of NYU Medical Center; John N. Kastanis, HJD President

Joseph D. Zuckerman, MD, Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, 1994–present.

and Chief Executive from 1996 to 2005; William A. Perlmuth, Chairman of the HJD Board of Trustees; David Dibner, HJD Chief Executive Officer; Jo-seph D. Zuckerman, MD; Steven Abramson, MD; and a multitude of other individuals who worked hard to bring this merger to fruition The merger will be complete and official on January 1, 2006. At that time, the name of the hospital will change yet again, officially becoming NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases. The Hospital will begin its second century as part of a world-class academic medical center poised for continued growth and success.

William A. Perlmuth, Board of Trustees member since 1979 and Chairman since 1994, who has ably guided the Hospital through challenging times.


NYU–Hospital for Joint Diseases Department of Orthopaedic Surgery

Chairman: Joseph D. Zuckerman, MD

Vice-Chairman: William L. Jaffe, MD

Service Chiefs

Orthopaedic Services, Hospital for Joint Diseases

Steven Stuchin, MD

Orthopaedic Services, Tisch Hospital

Justin Lamont, MD

Orthopaedic Services, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

Joseph Bosco, MD

Orthopaedic Services, Bellevue Hospital Center

Noel Testa, MD

Orthopaedic Services, Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Ralph Lusskin, MD

Adult Reconstruction

Paul Di Cesare, MD

Foot and Ankle

Kenneth Mroczek, MD

Hand

Martin Posner, MD

Orthopaedic Oncology

Samuel Kenan, MD

Pediatric Orthopaedics

David Feldman, MD

Shoulder and Elbow

Andrew Rokito, MD

Spine

Thomas Errico, MD

Sports Medicine

Orrin Sherman, MD

Trauma/Fracture

Kenneth Egol, MD

OfficersPresident of the Board: Emanuel M. Gattle

First Vice President: Louis BlunSecond Vice President: Paul M. Herzog

Treasurer: Louis F. RothschildSecretary: Harry Long

Lawrence AckmanHenry W. BerinsteinRichard A. BernsteinMrs. Susan ChaproJames CohenMichael CrowRichard EbersJohn P. FalkSamuel Florman Victor H. Frankel, MD, PhDJames C. Frauenthal, PhDStephen C. FrauenthalRobert L. Frome, Esq.Robert M. Glickman, MDDonald M. GrayAlan Harris, MD, PhDMrs. Eleanor HammermanStanley H. KaplanStanley KatzmanFelix Kaufman, PhDThomas Kempner

Mrs. Elaine MalsinSheldon O. NewmanDouglas A. Phillips, CPAWilliam A. PerlmuthEric C. Rackow, MDJohn B. RhodesAlan S. SamuelsMrs. Norma SmithRobin Smith, MDFrank J. SpitalnyWilliam C. Steere, Jr.John M. StewartMichael StolerMrs. Carol StoneThomas J. TischAnthony G. ViscogliosiDan K. WassongAlan G. Weiler

Office of the PresidentDavid A. Dibner, FACHE, Chief Executive Officer

Hospital for Joint Diseases Orthopaedic Institute2005 Board of Trustees

The Jewish Hospital for Deformities and Joint Dis-eases

1905 Board of TrusteesPrincipal OfficersChairman of the Board: William A. Perlmuth

Executive Vice Chairman: Alan G. Weiler Treasurer: Felix Kaufman, PhD Secretary: Stephen C. Frauenthal

MembersDirectorsLemuel Baum

Louis BlunAlbert Erdman

Henry W. Frauenthal, MDEmanuel M. Gattle

Paul M. HerzogHarry Long

Joseph E. MeyerOscar Meyer

Herman PlautJ. W. Riglander

Louis F. RothschildMaurice Rothschild

E. A. SternGeorge Schlesinger

hospital for joint diseases 1905 2005 - new york...

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