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Paul Randall Harrington (September 27, 1911 – November 29, 1980) was an American orthopaedic surgeon. He is best known as the designer of the Harrington Rod, the first device for the straightening and immobilization of the spine inside the body. It entered common use in the early 1960s and remained the gold standard for scoliosis surgery until the late 1990s. During this period over one million people benefited from Harrington's procedure. ==Early life== Harrington was born September 27, 1911 and educated in the Kansas City school system, from which he graduated in 1930, having been named one of the State of Kansas' 15 most outstanding high-school graduates. He had initially not planned to go to college but changed his mind after being offered a basketball scholarship by the University of Kansas. During his time at the University of Kansas he competed on their basketball team, which won the Big Eight championship three years in a row. In his senior year he was elected captain of the team. An initial interest in the field of physical education bloomed into an interest in medicine. He attended the University of Kansas School of Medicine and graduated in 1939, having worked his way through school playing semi-professional basketball. In 1936 he tried out for the national Olympic team and won the championship of his region in the javelin, but did not end up attending the finals in Chicago due to the cost involved.〔 Harrington undertook his internship and first year of surgical residency at Roper Hospital, Charleston, South Carolina, after which he returned to St Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, where he completed his residency in orthopaedic surgery in 1942, under Doctors Frank Dickson and Rex Dively.〔 〕 He then joined the United States Army.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Paul Randall Harrington, M.D., 1911–1980 )〕 In the Army, from May 1942 to November 1945 Harrington served as a doctor at the 77th Evacuation Hospital in World War II, acting as chief of the orthopaedic service. The 77th Evacuation Hospital was made up largely of medical practitioners from the University of Kansas Schools of Medicine and Nursing, and saw service in Europe and Africa.〔 It was during his time with the 77th that Harrington encountered such military celebrities as General George S. Patton.〔 Following the war Harrington moved to Texas and worked as a surgeon at Jefferson Davis County Hospital in Houston. During the post-war years a poliomyelitis epidemic caused polio cases to swell dramatically and they eventually became his main priority. At this time he worked with the Baylor College of Medicine to create the Southwest Respiratory Foundation of the National Infantile Paralysis Association, the first such organisation in the United States.〔 Polio patients would sometimes develop scoliosis, a condition where the spine becomes curved laterally (from side to side). Harrington realised that existing treatments for scoliosis, which relied heavily on physical therapy, were inappropriate for patients paralysed by polio, and began to research new treatments. An early method he tried for scoliotic polio patients was manual correction of the scoliotic deformity at the time of surgery, and internal fixation of each facet. There were some benefits to this treatment but Harrington found that the fixation would not hold.〔 The hooks and threaded rods used would corrode and break, causing curvature to return to the spine. Two patients of this procedure died.〔 Undeterred, from the late 1940s to late 1950s Harrington worked on what would eventually become known as the Harrington implant, or Harrington Rod.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paul Randall Harrington」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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