Stone Gardens: One of the most renowned orthopedic surgeons in history hailed from Craig County

Dr. Charles Sumner Neer II

Out in the quiet stretch of Craig County where the prairie still holds the old Cherokee trails and the wind carries a little of the past, there lived a man who left Vinita as a young fellow and came home decades later having changed the way the world looks at a busted shoulder.

Charles Sumner Neer II was born on November 10, 1917, the son of pioneer Oklahoma Territory surgeon Charles S. Neer and Pearl Brooke Neer, and the grandson of another physician. Medicine ran in the blood the way cattle ran in some of the neighboring pastures. He grew up in that small railroad town, learning the value of steady hands and clear thinking long before he ever set foot in a big city operating room.

He headed east for school, finished at Dartmouth in 1939, then took his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942. An internship followed, and he started a residency on the Fracture Service at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. The war interrupted all that.

As a captain in the Army, he served as an orthopaedic surgeon across three theaters. First he worked under General George Patton in Europe, treating the broken bones and shattered limbs that came with the hard push across the continent. Later the Army sent him to Asia, where he continued the same careful work in the Philippines and Japan.

Those years as a wartime surgeon left their mark. He saw what modern weapons could do to a body and learned under pressure how to put the pieces back together as best a man could. When the fighting ended, he came home with the rank of captain and the quiet pride of having done his duty.

At his funeral in Vinita the military honors given at Fairview Cemetery marked that service for all to see.

He returned to finish his training and stayed at Columbia-Presbyterian for the next fifty years. He rose to director of the Fracture Service, chief of the Adult Orthopaedic Service, and tenured professor. He built the first dedicated Shoulder Service and started the first formal fellowship in shoulder and elbow surgery in 1976.

Young doctors from all over the world came to learn from him. In 1982 he founded the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons and served as its first president. He also helped establish the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery and chaired its board of trustees.

What he did for the shoulder is hard to overstate. In 1955 he introduced a practical hemiarthroplasty prosthesis that actually worked and stayed in place, giving people with shattered upper arms a chance at real function again. He laid out the classification system for proximal humerus fractures that surgeons still use every day.

He described impingement syndrome and developed the anterior acromioplasty to relieve it. He clarified rotator cuff problems, instability, and a dozen other conditions that used to leave patients limping through life.

His textbook, "Shoulder Reconstruction", published in 1990, became the book every shoulder surgeon kept close. Papers poured out of his service by the hundreds. One count put him as the most cited author in orthopaedic surgery at the time. A Neer prosthesis even found a permanent home in the national medical museum collections.

Folks who worked with him remember a deliberate man with a warm smile and a dry wit. He drove an old small sedan without any fuss. He washed his own patients before surgery, taking his time with the antiseptic steps. He disliked being called Charly and kept a certain distance that marked respect more than coldness.

Intellectual honesty mattered to him above almost everything. He trained more than fifty fellows and welcomed visitors from every corner of the globe. Many of those students went on to lead the field themselves.

In 1990 he retired as emeritus professor and consultant and came straight home to Vinita. He settled back on the rural place that had always been his, with his wife Eileen, their adopted son Charles Henry, and the peace of the Oklahoma countryside. Daughters Sydney and Charlotte were part of the wider family circle that stayed close.

He kept up with tennis, tended his horses, and lived simply. On February 28, 2011, at the age of ninety-four, he passed away of natural causes on that same ground where he had started. Services were held at the First United Methodist Church, and interment with military honors followed at Fairview Cemetery.

He loved God, his country, and his family, and he left the practice of medicine better than he found it. Around Craig County, they still speak of him as the local boy who went out into the wider world, served when called, did the hard, careful work, and came back to rest among the people who knew him first.