Josep Trueta and the closed treatment of war fractures (1936-1939)

A Barcelona surgeon who, treating the wounded of a bombed city, standardised a handling of compound fractures that broke with the reflexes of the last war: excise early, do not suture, do not drain, seal the limb in unsplit plaster, leave it alone. His published series was 1,073 patients with six deaths. He carried it to England in February 1939 with the Barcelona transfusion service, and read it to British surgeons before their cities were bombed. He did not invent it, and who did is contested.