Gavriil Abramovich Ilizarov (Russian: Гавриил Абрамович Илизаров; 15 June 1921 – 24 July 1992)
Was a Soviet physician, known for inventing the Ilizarov apparatus for lengthening limb bones and for the method of surgery named after him, the Ilizarov surgery.
He discovered that by carefully severing a bone without severing the periosteum around it, one could separate two halves of a bone slightly and fix them in place, and the bone would grow to fill the gap. He also discovered that bone regrows at a fairly uniform rate across people and circumstances. These experiments led to the design of what is known as an Ilizarov apparatus, which holds a bone so severed in place, by virtue of a framework and pins through the bone, and separates halves of the bone by a tiny amount; by repeating this over time, at the rate of the bone's regrowth, it is possible to extend a bone by a desired amount
In 1980, Carlo Mauri, an Italian mountaineer, explorer, and photojournalist, on the urgings of his Russian colleague Yuri Senkevich, travelled to Kurgan, in the Soviet Union. He was to be treated by Ilizarov for a tibial fracture that healed incorrectly after a skiing accident ten years earlier. Italian doctors had long given up hope of any surgical improvement to the leg. Ilizarov distracted the stiff non-union in his tibia by 2 cm, healing the pseudarthrosis, corrected an equinus deformity by distraction and lengthened his leg. Mauri dubbed Ilizarov "the Michelangelo of Orthopaedics". On his return to Italy, the healing of Mauri's leg amazed orthopaedic surgeons. Subsequent to this, Ilizarov was invited by Antonio Bianchi-Maiocchi and Roberto Cattaneo to be a guest speaker at the AO Italy conference in 1981 in Bellagio. He gave three lectures at the conferences to more than 200 participants from Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany.
