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Dr. Ralph Bingham Cloward, a neurosurgeon whose career spanned treating casualties in the Pearl Harbor attack to creating landmark surgical innovations, died Monday at Queen's Medical Center. He was 92. Storied island
neurosurgeon Ralph B.
Cloward dies at 92He created landmark innovations
during a long and distinguished careerOBITUARIES
By Harold Morse
Star-BulletinCloward began his Honolulu practice in 1938. A specialist in treating spinal injuries, he developed a technique using bone grafts to help fuse discs.
"Most surgeons only remove the troublesome disc, but this doesn't cure the problem," he told the Star-Bulletin in 1986. Instead, he removed the damaged discs and replaced them with small plugs of bone, taken from the patient or from a cadaver.
For this procedure, he set up the first bone bank in the United States, and other bone banks sprang up around the country.
Dr. Paul M. Lin, an editor of a medical book that reprinted Cloward's article on his technique, called him a "technical genius."
"Dr. Cloward was so far ahead of his time in technical skill that he made others appear inferior," Lin said.
Cloward also perfected a technique that became famous: a way to operate on cervical discs of the neck from the throat, called an anterior approach. Before this, surgeons had operated from the back of the neck.
The most publicized case using this technique occurred in 1965 after a husband-and-wife team of Polish doctors wrote to him on behalf of their 16-year-old daughter. They explained that a tumor on her spine might be fatal. Cloward's role as a Rotarian paid off: the Rotary Club of Honolulu paid all expenses to bring mother and daughter here, and the operation was a success.
Cloward also developed more than 100 surgical instruments that bear his name and are widely used.
His Pearl Harbor Day memories included rushing to Tripler Hospital to aid the wounded. Doctors worked nonstop as the injured kept pouring in. On the evening of the fourth day, Cloward headed home after having performed more than 40 operations. The headlights on his Ford had been painted black except for a half-inch blue strip in the middle. In the blackout, his car dropped into an unseen, deep ditch on School Street.
But his surgical performance earned him mention in national magazines. Time reported he saved lives and wits of "a large number" of sailors and soldiers.
Cloward continued to patch up people into his late 70s.
He was born in Salt Lake City, graduated from McKinley High School here in 1926 and studied at the universities of Hawaii, Utah and Chicago.
He was chief of staff of the neurosurgery departments of Queen's, St. Francis and Kuakini hospitals, and a consultant in neurology and neurosurgery. He authored scores of technical articles in medical journals, going back to 1937.
A man of many talents, he was a clarinetist with the Royal Hawaiian Hotel Orchestra in 1927 and played first clarinet with the Honolulu Symphony.
He is survived by son Kerry; daughters Karen McGregor of Los Angeles, Calif., and Kathleen Sattler, and 12 grandchildren. Services are pending.