the treatment of shoulder injuries.^2 Codman instigated many crucial
changes in medicine, including outcomes research, hospital accreditation,
tumor registries, and the advancement of shoulder surgery. Despite his
pioneering role in medicine, and particularly in shoulder surgery, Dr.
Codman never published a journal article on shoulder fractures, arthritis,
rotator cuff tears, or shoulder instability. After a tumultuous career, Dr.
Codman died in 1940 at the age of seventy, and in the war-torn decade that
followed, a few scattered reports on the treatment of comminuted, or
“shattered,” fracture dislocations of the shoulder were published. These
articles (written in English, Italian, and German), published just half a
century ago, are shockingly simplistic to the modern reader and would
stand zero chance of publication today. In general, the authors concluded
that surgery of smashed and fragmented shoulder bones was successful
(enough) if the fragments were simply removed, leaving a blank shoulder
socket that was intended to heal with a blob of scar tissue, with the hope
that the resultant “flail arm” provided at least a modicum of function with
the arm at the side. The journal publications in the 1940s included no
measurements of angular motion of the shoulder joint, no pain scores, and
minimal commentary about functional abilities.
A more scientific (less anecdotal) evaluation of the flail arm patients
was needed, and the young Charlie Neer was the man to do it.
Born and raised in Vinita, Oklahoma, Charles Sumner Neer II was the
namesake of a general physician and surgeon, who was born in New York,
trained in St. Louis, and practiced frontier medicine in the Indian Territory
that would become the forty-sixth state of the Union. The elder Dr. Neer
was himself the son of a physician, and Charlie once wrote that his father
“never once thought of me being anything other than a doctor.”^3
Vinita, Oklahoma, was the epitome of a frontier town when Charlie was
born on November 10, 1917. Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907,
formed from the many independent Indian lands of the (western)
Oklahoma Territory and (eastern) Indian Territory. Vinita, located in
northeast Oklahoma (near the Kansas and Missouri borders), was in the
center of Cherokee lands when the elder C. S. Neer moved there from
Missouri to start his new practice.
C. S. Neer, senior, established his clinical practice on the major
intersection of town (Wilson Street and Illinois Avenue), on what is now
US Route 66. Utilizing literature search techniques, one can trace Dr.