Professor Gavriil Abramovich Ilizarov, the genius Orthopaedician, gave the ilizarov circular fixator and the law of Tension stress to the world, thereby developing a whole new doctrine of tissue regeneration with bone distraction. Belonging to a humble background from the town of Beloveghsk, Russia, he was an epitome of great persistence and an ever burning intellectual curiosity towards natural phenomena and science. He graduated from Simpheropol Medical School, Crimea in 1944, and without any practical training , was sent to work in the Kurgan district of Western Siberia, which was medically , very poorly equipped. In 1950 after his promotion to Staff Physician in the hospital for war invalids in Kurgan, while treating his patients, he realised that the conventional means of treating such injuries were fraught with a high rate of non- unions, infections and deformities. This activated his desire of breaking through stagnation of the conservative principles of treatment. His Eureka moment came in 1951, when he developed the ring for stable transosseus fixation. The Ilizarov's ring was first in the World with two K -wires in crossing directions assisted by Bohler's splint for skeletal traction. He persisted and developed many a part of his ring fixator with the help of his grateful patients and widened its application over different indications. After his initial results he got the fixator to Moscow in 1958, however the same was welcomed with cold shoulders of the leading Professors of Orthopaedics in Russia and he was left to be an unknown Provincial Physician from Siberia. With his observations of corticotomy followed by distraction in his own laboratory, Dr Ilizarov noticed neo-osteogenesis and propounded the theory of Tension- Stress, which led to a revolution in the management of non- unions and pseudoarthrosis.
Within the local populace, he had started to be known as - "The Magician from Kurgan". Dr Ilizarov finally rose to fame in 1967 when he successfully treated an Olympic champion, high-jumper, Valery Brumel who had sustained a leg fracture , subsequently plagued with persistent nonunion and osteomyelitis. This incident opened the doors for his acceptance within his own country as a Master Surgeon. He was inducted into the Academy of Science and the Russian Parliament as well as granted state funds to build an Institute of Experimental and Clinical Orthopedic Surgery in the city of Kurgan and continue his work. Another incidence which catapulted Dr Ilizarov to International fame was the successful treatment of Carlo Mauri, an Italian author and explorer for severe persistent nonunion and osteomyelitis of the leg in 1980, following which a team of Orthopaedic surgeons from Italy went to Russia to learn the technique. Subsequently his technique was popularised in America by Dr Victor Frankel and Dr Vladimir Golyakhovsky and first surgery using an ilizarov fixator was performed in 1986. The first international Symposium of the Ilizarov technique was organised in New York, in 1987, by the Hospital for Joint Diseases, titled as "Graviil Abramovich Ilizarov-The Man, The Creator, The Teacher". He visited India in 1983. Professor Ilizarov has published more than 600 scientific papers and the monographic creation "Trans osseous Osteosynthesis".
July 24, 1992, Professor Gavriil Abramovich Ilizarov suddenly passed away from heart failure, at the age of 71.
"The world lost the remarkable Man, the Creator, and the Teacher"
