musculoskeletal problems, and he pioneered the surgical resection of a
tuberculous hip infection in 1854.
Dr. Gibney was surgeon-in-chief at R&C for almost forty years (1887–
1925), and oversaw the creation of the first orthopedic residency in the
United States in 1887, and the building of the first operating room at R&C
in 1889. In the tumultuous last decade of the 19th century, the practice of
orthopedics was upended at R&C under Gibney’s leadership. Surgery took
center stage, and the driving force for that change was the arrival of Royal
Whitman in 1889.
The iconoclastic tendencies of Royal Whitman (1857–1946) perfectly
matched Virgil Gibney’s. A former student recalled, he “was always trying
out new procedures—either those he initiated or those suggested by others.
He had an insatiable curiosity about the pathogenesis of orthopaedic
diseases and deformities, and an imagination which led him continuously
to seek new methods of manipulative or surgical correction of
musculoskeletal defects.”^20 Whitman published a tour de force textbook,
A Treatise on Orthopaedic Surgery, in 1901, revising it nine times over the
next twenty years.
In the decades that Gibney and Whitman were active at the Hospital for
the Ruptured and Crippled, yet another hospital was built (to
accommodate the building of a new Grand Central Terminal), forcing a
move east several blocks in 1912. By this time, there were multiple
medical schools, religious and academic hospitals, and numerous surgical
training programs in Manhattan. Orthopedics, however, was a clinical
practice of casting and bracing, and a surgical discipline of excision and
drainage. No one in the world was reliably implanting any metal, and, of
course, plastics were yet to be invented.
The move to its present (and fourth) location along the East River at
70th and 71st Streets did not occur until 1955, but by that time the
reputation of the Hospital for Special Surgery (the name had been changed
in 1950) was sterling. Its association with the New York Hospital and
Cornell University Medical College was critical, as was a deepening
commitment to basic science research.
Around the world, orthopedics had become a specialty of bone, muscle,
ligament, and tendon repair and reconstruction. Fracture care had
transitioned from casting and bracing to “internal fixation” with plates and