Paul Randall Harrington

Paul Randall Harrington (September 27, 1911 – November 29, 1980) was an American orthopaedic surgeon. He is best known as the designer of the Harrington Rod, the first device for the straightening and immobilization of the spine inside the body. It entered common use in the early 1960s and remained the gold standard for scoliosis surgery until the late 1990s. During this period over one million people benefited from Harrington's procedure.

Early life Harrington was born on September 27, 1911, and educated in the Kansas City school system, from which he graduated in 1930, having been named one of the State of Kansas' 15 most outstanding high-school graduates. He had initially not planned to go to college but changed his mind after being offered a basketball scholarship by the University of Kansas. During his time at the University of Kansas from 1931 to 1934 he competed on their basketball team, which won the Big Eight championship three years in a row. In his senior year he was elected captain of the team.

An initial interest in the field of physical education bloomed into an interest in medicine. He attended the University of Kansas School of Medicine and graduated in 1939, having worked his way through school playing semi-professional basketball. In 1936 he tried out for the national Olympic team and won the championship of his region in the javelin, but did not end up attending the finals in Chicago due to the cost involved. He then joined the United States Army.

In the Army, from May 1942 to November 1945 Harrington served as a doctor at the 77th Evacuation Hospital in World War II, acting as chief of the orthopaedic service. The 77th Evacuation Hospital was made up largely of medical practitioners from the University of Kansas Schools of Medicine and Nursing, and saw service in Europe and Africa. Harrington realised that existing treatments for scoliosis, which relied heavily on physical therapy, were inappropriate for patients paralysed by polio, and began to research new treatments. An early method he tried for scoliotic polio patients was manual correction of the scoliotic deformity at the time of surgery, and internal fixation of each facet. There were some benefits to this treatment but Harrington found that the fixation would not hold.

Late life During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harrington traveled extensively, demonstrating the techniques associated with the Harrington Rod.

Death and legacy Harrington died in Houston, Texas, on November 29, 1980. where they are now known as the Harrington Archives (a subset of the Spine and Orthopedic Historical Collections). The archives contain "Harrington's professional papers, photographs, publications, manuscripts, blueprints, drawings, and examples of the Harrington Rod." They also include "biographical information, presentations, professional correspondence files, personal correspondence, personal photographs, movies, and videotapes. Display cases in the archives exhibit photographs, documents, and artifacts that depict the history of Harrington's life and career." In 2015, Marc A. Asher published Dogged Persistence: Harrington, Post-Polio Scoliosis and the Origin of Spine Instrumentation, which chronicles his development of the Harrington Rod.

Baylor College of Medicine awards the Paul Harrington Award for Excellence in Orthopaedic Research in recognition of Harrington's contribution to spinal surgery.