Draft:Gerald L. Burke

• Comment: To establish notability, the sources need to be independent of the subject. Kovcszaln6 (talk) 13:19, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Primary sources (i.e. written by the subject) do not help to establish notability. 97198 (talk) 04:19, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: I'm not sure I understand your take on notability. It is my understanding that publication of research projects in peer-reviewed scientific journals meets the standard test of notability in Wikipedia. These journals exist in order to verify scientific credibility (i.e. notability). Are you saying that this is not so? Can you explain? Henrilebec (talk) 07:55, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

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Gerald Louis Burke
Born	(1906-12-29)29 December 1906 Bloemfontein, South Africa
Died	30 March 1968
Education	MD, 1938
Alma mater	University of Alberta
Occupations	medical researcher surgeon author
Years active	30+
Spouses	Constance Jacqueline Wilson (1919-1944) Margaret Elsie Perkins (1921-1998)

Gerald Louis Burke, MD (29 December 1905 – 30 March 1968) was a Canadian surgeon, medical researcher, academic, and a pioneer in the development, manufacture, and the first known use of tantalum metal plates and fasteners for the stable surgical repair of bone fractures. Later, in Vancouver's St. Paul's Hospital, he led a team of surgeons developing surgical remedies for spinal injuries and chronic back pain. His work on backache led to the publication of "Backache from Occiput to Coccyx" in 1958 and, together with Bernard Grumler, contributed to "Suspensionthérapie et pouliethérapie - Guide Pratique" by Sauramps Médical in 1993.

The use of metals in orthopaedic surgery

Burke's early research at the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital and the Department of Physical Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, was focused on the use of metals in surgery, and his team's pioneering research was published in 1940. In "The Corrosion of Metals in Tissues", Burke's team at Cal-Tech with John Norton Wilson, PhD, Dr.David Stevenson, and Emil Burcik (all of the Dept of Physical Chemistry) was the first to make a detailed analysis of the various metals attempted in surgical repairs, and describing the chemistry of the success and failures of previous experiments. Their work was following on from the earlier analysis of Walter G. Stuck which described the perils of the electrolytic destruction of tissues resulting from metallic implants. Other than surgical repair of routine industrial accidents, Burke's team was focused on related surgical specializations such as polio reconstruction, and repair of military battle damage (thereby avoiding amputation with its concomitant challenging consequences). Burke described the team's first successful use of tantalum in femoral and intertrochanteric fractures, for arthroplasty joint replacement, for clean non-scarring sutures, and for repair of trauma damage resulting from industrial or war-time battle injuries, and, eventually, for dental and jaw surgery prior to developing cosmetic fittings for dental implants. Burke's team was the first anywhere to conduct a chemical/metallurgical analysis of scarce and expensive metals like tantalum and titanium for the feasibility of engineering implants in living tissue. Burke and his team subsequently developed the manufacturing processes, leading to the now widely accepted use of tantalum and titanium in orthopaedic surgery and dentistry. Burke showed that both metals were strong enough and sufficiently stable for human implants in spite of the early difficulty in refining and fabrication.

Burke's subsequent work in the field of chronic joint pain was first mentioned in Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery in 1951. In a related field, Burke later wrote and published in 1958 Backache from Occiput to Coccyx documenting the ceturies of reserarch into the baffling and challenging issue of chronic back pain, and new innovative and simplified surgical procedures. This work was reviewed in "The Simple Problem of Backache", Bulletin of the Vancouver Medical Association, March 1958.

References

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Categories:

• 1906 births
• Canadian surgeons
• Canadian medical researchers
• Canadian academics
• People from Bloemfontein
• University of Alberta alumni
• 1968 deaths