[The history of orthopedics in Freiburg]

During the 19th century orthopedic medicine in Germany developed uniformly. The starting point was almost always the foundation of a private institute, which was then taken over by state/communal or confessional/charitable bodies, and in some cases universities. In Freiburg, however, orthopedics developed very differently. From the very beginning it was a clinical and academic discipline within the university. Orthopedic medicine was practised systematically at Freiburg Surgical Clinic from about 1835 on, and it was at this time that the first lectures in Orthopedics were given. Freiburg also has one of the oldest university orthopedic institutes. The founding of an Extraordinary Chair of Orthopedic Medicine is due to the efforts of the pathologist Aschoff and the surgeon Kraske. Besides Carl Friedrich Hecker, the special development of orthopedics in Freiburg may be attributed to the work of Georg Friedrich Louis Stromeyer. It is to him that orthopedics--in Freiburg and elsewhere--owes a debt not only for introducing surgical procedures, but first and foremost for its establishment as a scientific discipline. The remarkably early rise of orthopedics in Freiburg was followed, after World War I, by a decline brought about by economic conditions and university policy. Its consequences were so far-reaching that the Chair of Orthopedic Medicine in Freiburg was not refounded until 1970- the last in Germany. Until that time orthopedics remained dependent on the judgment or indulgence of the directors of the surgical clinic, who regarded orthopedics as a conservative discipline, or at best as a branch of limb surgery.