ilizarov.biz

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.

In 1951, Ilizarov moved to Kurgan, where he had more opportunity to use his device and to develop its applications. In Kurgan, he used the device to stabilize fractures and nonunions and to investigate the effect of separation of bone on the osteoblastic reaction of bone. He became professor of orthopedics and director of the Kurgan Research Institute for Experimental Orthopedics and Traumatology.

Ilizarov was the first to show that distraction rather than compression causes the healing of fractures and pseudarthrosis. He observed that osteogenesis bridges the destruction gap spontaneously, new bone is rapidly remodeled to conform to the natural structure, osteogenic potential exists in skeletally mature bone, and preservation of bone marrow by corticotomy alone is an optional procedure for bone lengthening.

Ilizarov’s important work and his fixator were generally ignored by the Russian medical community until about 1967, when the Olympic champion high jumper Valery Brumel (1942- ) became one of Ilizarov’s patients after being injured in a motorcycle accident. Brumel sustained a compound fracture of the left tibia and fibula. The wound was contaminated, and as a result of osteomyelitis, the lower segment of the fibula was destroyed. Brumel went to Kurgan to be treated by Ilizarov. Ilizarov osteotomized the fibula and distracted it down to the level of the lateral malleolus, thereby creating a new lateral part of the ankle. A year later, Brumel resumed his athletic activities.

Ilizarov died in Kurgan in 1992, at the age of 71 years.