Manuel Bastos Ansart and the closed method before the Civil War (1909-1924)

A Spanish army surgeon who, between a colonial war in Morocco and a children's ward in Madrid, was treating open fractures by excision and sealed plaster fifteen years before the Civil War made the technique famous under another man's name. His route into it ran through Paris and Buenos Aires rather than the American literature: the Argentine surgeon Pedro Chutró taught it in Madrid in 1921. The historians who recovered him do not claim he invented the method - their argument is that nobody did.