The Classic

Abstract

Otto Stader (Fig. 1) was born in Germany and brought to the United States by his parents when he was six years old. He was educated and trained to be a veterinarian. During World War I, he served in the Veterinary Corps of the U. S. Army. After his return to civilian life, he had a large animal practice until 1930 when he decided to specialize in the treatment of small animals. He established a small animal hospital in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. It was here that he developed his method of treating long bone fractures by means of an external skeletal fixation device which became known as the Stader splint. As a result of this technique, Stader became well known and received numerous awards from the national and international veterinarian community. Although the first notice of this method appeared in the North American Veterinarian,1,3 the technique was described in the surgical literature by two surgeons from Bellevue Hospital, New York, who had seen the application of the splint to a police dog with a fractured femur, and who had a larger model of the external skeletal fixation device manufactured for use in humans. It is this paper by Kenneth M. Lewis and Lester Breidenbach with Otto Stader as a coauthor that has been selected as the classic article. As a substitute for plaster casts in personnel at sea, the Stader splint was used by the United States Navy during World War II and one of the best descriptions of the technique is found in a manual published by two Navy medical officers.2 The Stader splint is the prototype of many subsequent external skeletal fixation systems, although Stader's contribution to their development is often ignored.