Ilizarov was born in 1921 in the isolated mountain village of Dagestan, Russia, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. His father died when Ilizarov was very young, and dire financial circumstances prevented him from attending school until he was 11 years old. He made up for the time lost, however, by completing 10 years of schooling in 5 years. Early on, he wanted to be a physician. To this end, he became a student at the Simferopol Medical Institute in the Crimean region. During World War II, he was evacuated to Kzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan, where he finished his medical studies and received his MD degree in 1943.

After Ilizarov received his medical degree, he was assigned to medical work in the village of Dolgovka (near Kurgan, about 140 miles east of Chelyabinsk) in western Siberia, where he was in charge of the only hospital in the region. While there—and working under the most primitive of conditions—he developed his famous external fixator (1951). The device and technique for repairing difficult fractures, and later used to lengthen limbs, involved metal rings of his own design and manufacture—2 half rings perforated with many holes. He drove Kirschner wires (named for the German surgeon Martin Kirschner [1879-1942]) through the bone, cross-inserting them above and below the fracture site, and secured the wires at the end of these metal rings. Ilizarov then aligned the broken bone fragment by manipulating the rings. After the bone fragments were in the proper position, they were immobilized by means of special rods connected to the rings. In this way, Ilizarov could not only treat fractures but also lengthen bone, correct deformities, and treat difficult bone infections.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Ilizarov developed the external fixation and bone-lengthening method to treat Russian soldiers who had been wounded during World War II (1939-1945). The method is now used throughout the world to lengthen limbs, to correct deformities, and to repair fractures believed to be otherwise untreatable. Ilizarov demonstrated that bone union can be stimulated not only by compression, as previously believed, but also by the fractional distraction, or pulling apart, of bone segments. (more…)