On December 24 (12th O.S.), 2024, we marked the 160th anniversary of the birth of the prominent orthopaedic traumatologist Professor Karl Fedorovych Waegner, who is considered the founder of orthopaedics and traumatology in Ukraine.

In 1894, he graduated from the medical faculty of Yuriev University (today Tartu, Estonia) and began working as a doctor in the Donbas region. In 1907, the Council of the Congress of Mining Industrialists of Southern Russia sent Karl Waegner to Germany to study the organization of medical care for workers injured in industrial accidents and the evaluation of working capacity. Based on the experience gained, he developed the idea of creating a Medical-Mechanical Institute, which was opened on June 8, 1907, and which he headed until 1926. This was the first medical institution in Ukraine specializing in orthopaedic and trauma care. Today, it is the State Institution “Sytenko Institute of Spine and Joint Pathology of the National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine.”

Karl Waegner was an advocate of the functional method of treating bone fractures, and from the very beginning of the institute’s existence, he and his colleagues focused on developing functional treatment methods for fractures.

Karl Waegner was the first in the Russian Empire, in 1910, to perform skeletal traction for the treatment of a femoral fracture. In 1914, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “Closed Fractures of the Femoral Diaphysis.” He also paid great attention to the organization of medical care for patients with musculoskeletal injuries.

From 1921 to 1926, Karl Waegner headed the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and was a professor of the Department of Operative Surgery with Topographic Anatomy at Kharkiv Medical Institute. In 1926, he moved to Moscow, where he led the orthopaedic department at the State Institute of Physiotherapy and Orthopaedics. In 1929, he moved to Switzerland, where he worked at the Steinmann Clinic. Karl Waegner passed away in December 1940 in Bern.