Leo Mayer MD
The NYU Department of Orthopaedic Surgery traces its origins to the nineteenth century and its long-term association with Bellevue Hospital. When Dr. Lewis Albert Sayre was appointed Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, Fractures, and Dislocations at Bellevue in 1853, it represented the first orthopaedic professorship in North America.
Dr. Sayre held this title, and later that of Professor of Clinical Surgery, until 1898, when Bellevue Hospital Medical College merged with University Medical College of NYU to become the New York University School of Medicine. Among the distinguished graduates of the medical school are Walter Reed, the conqueror of yellow fever; Joseph Goldberger, who demonstrated the dietary origin of pellagra and its control; and Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who developed the first effective vaccines against poliomyelitis.
The history of the Hospital for Joint Diseases begins in 1905, when the brothers Henry and Herman Frauenthal, physicians with a mission to help children with infantile paralysis, founded the Jewish Hospital for Deformities and Joint Diseases. While the original facility was a modest seven-bed clinic on upper Lexington Avenue, within a few short years six contiguous brownstones had been purchased and converted into the Hospital for Joint Diseases.
The highlights of HJD orthopaedics since those early days include the establishment of orthopaedic pathology as a specialty in the United States by Dr. Henry Jaffe in the 1920s, the first research on arthroscopic techniques in this country by Dr. Michael S. Burman later in that decade, the development of orthopaedic procedures for treating polio and congenital deformities in children by Drs. Leo Mayer and Henry Milch in the 1940s, establishment in 1960 of the first biomechanics laboratory in the United States by Dr. Victor H. Frankel, chairman emeritus of the HJD Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, and development of human chondrocyte transplantation protocols by HJD researchers in the current decade.
Both institutions thus share in the great strides made in the twentieth century in orthopaedic treatment, knowledge, and innovation.
Read more about the history of the Hospital for Joint Diseases.