San Baw
He is best known for pioneering "the use of ivory hip prostheses to replace ununited fractures of the neck of the femur," and developing "a new technique for treating infantile pseudoarthrosis of the tibia.
[4] However, the arrival of World War II in late 1941 had shut down all the few colleges in the country, and it was only in 1944 that he was able to enroll at the wartime medical school,[4] founded a year earlier by Drs.
[4] San Baw started his medical career at Rangoon General Hospital (RGH) in June 1950.
He is best known for pioneering the use of "ivory hip prostheses to replace ununited fractures of the neck of the femur," and for developing "a new technique for treating infantile pseudoarthrosis of the tibia.
Hip replacements using ivory had been performed by Themistocles Gluck in 1891, and Ernest W. Hey Groves in 1927 but did not gain widespread use like metallic prostheses.
Based on the results, he designed "his novel ivory hip specifically for patients with longstanding nonunions of displaced femoral neck fractures, ankylosing spondylitis, and avascular necrosis.
It replaced the un-united femoral neck fracture of an 83-year-old Burmese Buddhist nun named Daw Ponnya.
[12][8] San Baw continued to refine his prosthesis designs using his own funds until 1965 when he finally received financial support from the Burmese government.
He read the paper “Ivory Hip Replacements for Ununited Fractures of the Neck of Femur”, and reported an 88% success rate with his patients, ranging in age from 24 to 87, able to walk, squat, ride a bicycle and play football a few weeks after their fractured hip bones were replaced with ivory prostheses.
He "developed a new technique for the treatment of congenital pseudarthrosis of the tibia", which was published in the February 1975 British edition of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, and used to treat at least 15 patients.
A heavy smoker since he was ten, San Baw spent his last years fighting lung cancer.
After his death, she abruptly resigned from her post as head of the Department of Medicine, and served as a consultant at the World Health Organization, based out of New Delhi, from 1985 to 1991.
[1] The couple had a son, Myint Zan, a former professor of law, who taught at universities in Malaysia, Australia, the South Pacific and the United States from 1989 to 2016.
The Penn Medicine magazine carried a short notice of San Baw's death with a brief description of his achievements in 1988, only after Myint Zan had contacted them.
A UK-based Polish orthopaedic surgeon Bartlomiej Szostakowski became interested in San Baw's career by accident,[2] and in 2017, he and his two other colleagues from the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital published a paper on ivory hemiarthroplasty that recounted the work and findings of San Baw and his team.
[8] The University of Pennsylvania Department of Orthopedic Surgery later agreed to hold annual lectures in Dr. San Baw's memory after Myint Zan made a donation to the school.
