Ignacio Ponseti and the nonoperative treatment of clubfoot

A doctor from Menorca who graduated at Barcelona in 1936, set fractures through the Civil War, crossed into France with a convoy of wounded in 1939 and practised two years in rural Mexico before reaching Iowa, found that clubfeet could be corrected by serial plaster casts, a small tendon cut and a brace, rather than by the surgery that left adults with stiff and painful feet. He published in 1963 and was ignored for thirty years. Evidence of the method is now recorded in 113 countries.