RT Journal
T1 Maurice Edmond Müller 1918-2009
JF The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery
JO The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery
YR 2009
FD November 1
VO 91
IS 11
SP 2773
OP 2773
DO 10.2106/JBJS.I.01257
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.2106/JBJS.I.01257
AB 
Born into a bilingual Swiss family, he benefited from French and German cultural influences, although his dreams were always in French. He started his medical training in Lausanne and finished in Zürich with a doctoral thesis on Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease. The amount of care and forethought that he put into the planning of his orthopaedic career is evidenced by his two years of travel, in the course of which he visited most of the important names in Europe at the time—today one would call this a traveling fellowship. Robert Danis of Belgium impressed him the most with his techniques of stable fixation of bone fragments. Müller immediately understood the immense potential of what he had seen. Back home at the Balgrist University Hospital in Zürich, he began to invest all his creativity and surgical skills in working on an overall concept of fracture fixation. In 1958, he presented his ideas to a small group of surgeon friends, which led to the founding of the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Osteosynthesefragen" (AO). Although the group came to face a period of harsh criticism, the stupendous results they achieved eventually led the orthopaedic establishment to accept a new way of fracture treatment. In the mid-1960s, Müller and his AO friends started to convey the concept to the New World, and, after some initial resistance, initiated an unparalleled and ongoing story of worldwide acceptance and success.