Ralph Bingham Cloward (September 24, 1908 — November 13, 2000) was an American neurosurgeon, best known for his innovations in spinal neurosurgery.
Cloward's pioneering contributions encompass many areas of neurosurgery, but his enduring interest was the spine, where he devised three major operations.
He first performed the posterior lumbar interbody fusion successfully in 1943, reporting it in the Hawaiian Territorial Medical Association in 1945 and publishing it in the Journal of Neurosurgery in 1953.
After William Mixter and Joseph Barr published their famed paper of disk herniation in 1934,[5] discectomy to remove stenosis became the routine procedure.
[7][8][9] During a posterior discectomy operation in 1940, Cloward noticed a large hole in the remaining annulus fibrosis, and it occurred to him that this void could be filled with a piece of bone.
[11] Because disk herniation recurred in many cases, Cloward devised to reattempt his posterior interbody fusion procedure, which he did with success.
[16] In later years, when pedicle screw and interbody cage instrumentation became widespread, the PLIF became the most popular method of lumbar fusion.
In the mid 1950s, techniques for anterior approach to cervical fusions were developed by four groups simultaneously; Carl Badgley, Leroy Abbott and Robert Bailey at the University of Michigan,[19] by Robert Robinson and George Smith at Johns Hopkins University, by Albert Dereymaeker and Joseph Mulier in France and by Cloward in Honolulu.
[4] Though not the first to perform or publish the procedure, his standing in the neurosurgical field at the time enhanced its early popularity.
It was felt that Ralph's innovative talents and pioneering efforts to establish anterior cervical and posterior lumbar interbody fusion plus the numerous instruments he devised was just cause to honor him in perpetuity by bestowing an award upon neurosurgeons from around the world who also exemplified such capacity for epochal innovation and pioneering application.