An Historical Perspective of the Development of Plate and Screw Fixation and Minimally Invasive Fracture Surgery With a Unified Biological Approach

The recent enthusiasm for minimally invasive surgery as applied to plate and screw fixation is actually the culmination of over 200 years of research, discovery, and experimentation. It actually represents a convergence of schools of thought on the nature of osteoreparative osteogenesis, the optimization of surgical treatment of fractures and implant and instrumentation optimization from the schools of external fixation, intramedullary fixation and plate and screw osteosynthesis. This article reviews the work of many but not all of the contributors to our current state of the art.