Web Exclusive - February 2003

Ignacio Ponseti was born in Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the east coast of Spain, and as a teenager, he helped his father repair watches. In his father’s workshop, he learned how to replace the tiny broken pieces, fitting them back into place perfectly. The work was good training for his future career as an orthopaedic surgeon.

In 1936, when he was a young medical student studying at the University of Barcelona, Ignacio Ponseti had already heard of Iowa. “The University of Iowa had a big name in orthopaedic surgery,” Ponseti said. “Dr. Arthur Steindler had come to the UI, and it was a very important center for specialists at the time.”

While it would be several years before Ponseti would come to the UI, his career in orthopaedics began right after medical school. The political situation in his country had started to unravel. One day after Ponseti finished his final medical school exams, fighting broke out between Francisco Franco Bahamonde’s forces and the Spanish Loyalist army. Franco’s uprising against the Spanish government turned into the three-year Spanish Civil War.

Ponseti volunteered to serve as a medical officer with the Loyalists, serving first as a lieutenant and later as a captain in the Orthopaedic and Fracture Service. Operating on the shattered limbs of Republican soldiers, Ponseti cut his teeth on war wounds. When Franco’s fascist army gained control in 1939, he found himself on the losing side. What to do with the ward of wounded officers under his care?

For three days and nights, buried up to his elbows in wet plaster as he prepared a risky evacuation, he set their fractures. The hospital ambulance had been stolen, so Ponseti turned to local smugglers for help. They loaned him mules and helped guide the groaning officers up over the Pyrenees Mountains and into the safety of France.

So began Ponseti’s career in medicine. “I got a lot of experience in treating war wounds and extremity wounds, treating fractures, and doing extremity surgery,” he said. “That’s how I got into orthopaedics.”

With no home and no citizenship, Ponseti soon left France for Mexico, which was accepting certain skilled refugees. He lived there for two years, practicing family medicine and studying English in his spare time. There he met Dr. Juan Farril, professor of orthopaedics at the University of Mexico. Farril, who had trained in the United States, encouraged Ponseti to go to Iowa and study with Dr. Arthur Steindler, chairman of orthopaedics and a world-famous orthopaedist.

Ponseti applied for graduate studies at the UI, but his circumstances were complicated by the fact that due to the Civil War, he had never received his medical school diploma. To make matters worse, his English was not good enough at the time to explain his situation. Ponseti bridged the communications gap by speaking in French with Carl Seashore, dean of the Graduate College at the time. He was admitted to Iowa’s residency program, completed it in 1944, and immediately joined the orthopaedic faculty at the UI Hospitals and Clinics.

“I thought it would be a temporary stay in the United States, that I would go back to Spain and teach there,” Ponseti said. “But I remained here. Spain was dominated by a Fascist regime for 40 years, and I didn’t want to be in a place where a dictatorship dominated.” — adapted from a Spring 2000 article in Iowa's College of Medicine newsletter and a story by Timothy Bascom for Iowa Alumni Magazine

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