Henrik Turner

TURNER, Henrik Ivanovich (born 1858), honored worker of science, founder of Russian clinical orthopedics, and a leading figure in the fight against childhood disability. English by origin. He graduated from the Medico-Surgical Academy in 1881, devoting himself to surgery under the guidance of K. K. Reyer. He first appeared in the public arena in 1887 by establishing public courses "On rendering first aid in accidents." In 1890, for his work "On the treatment of cicatricial strictures of the esophagus by retrograde bougienage," he was awarded the Sklifosovsky gold medal. In 1892, he defended his dissertation "On the anatomy of the cecum and appendix in relation to the pathology of perityphlitis" (St. Petersburg). In 1894, he received the title of privat-docent in clinical surgery at the Military Medical Academy in the Department of Desmurgy and Mechanurgy, and was approved as professor of this department in 1895. Through persistent struggle, Turner achieved the expansion and transformation of the department instead of its liquidation, which had been planned by the Academy conference. The technique of antisepsis and asepsis was assigned to desmurgy, the doctrine of dislocations and fractures was added, and orthopedics was mentioned for the first time. In 1900, Turner conquered a part of the barracks premises and created the first independent department of orthopedics.

Among the issues of field surgery, Turner was particularly concerned with simplified methods of disinfecting dressings, antiseptic treatment of wounds, and the technique of fracture immobilization. His device for the disinfection of instruments and dressing materials is best known and adopted for army supply. His textbook on desmurgy has gone through five editions since 1908. In the treatment of fractures, Turner's merit is the further development of Pirogov's plaster technique and criticism of surgical methods aimed solely at the mechanical fixation of fragments, without taking into account biological consolidation factors. He considered the proclamation of traction as a new and sole functional method of treatment to be a misunderstanding, pointing to the antiquity and conditional value of this method. Independently of foreign authors, he proposed percussion of the fracture site in cases of delayed union. Among Turner's works in the field of technical invention, one must mention the modification of hardening bandages, plaster and metal splints, the combination of a stethoscope and hammer in a single device, drainage tubes with a funnel-shaped socket, forceps for wound tamponade, a new system of renal bandages, and a special lever for the redressment of clubfeet and flatfeet. Works on the curvatures of the femoral neck, traumatic and therapeutic epiphysiolysis, a new method of knee arthrodesis and treatment of chronic patellar fractures, Bechterew's disease of the spine, the differential signs and clinical significance of pneumococcal bone infections from tuberculosis, the manifestation of the body's defense forces in the course of tuberculous spondylitis, complications from peripheral nerves in classical radial fractures and other injuries, march fractures of the foot, and clinical forms of postoperative fat embolism occupy a firm place in world literature. It is necessary to single out as a special category his works on the significance of congenital spinal anomalies for professional work capacity. Associated with this is another characteristic feature of Turner's scientific activity, namely his ability to generalize a specific case and revive dead museum material. Formerly a casuistic rarity, spondylolisthesis (see) became under his hands a vast chapter of orthopedics. He organized university sports at a time when the very concept of physical culture did not yet exist. Finally, he was the first in tsarist Russia to raise his voice in favor of the disabled child and pointed out the necessity of a planned state struggle against childhood disability. However, only the Soviet government implemented these ideas. It created the Institute for the Restoration of Work Capacity of Physically Defective Children in Leningrad, naming it after Turner.