Dr. Clement Sledge, a native of Oklahoma, graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and Yale Medical School. Following a surgical internship at Barnes Hospital and two years at sea in the Navy, he returned to Washington University for a second year of general surgery training and then moved to Boston for his orthopaedic residency in the Children’s Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital Residency Program (HCORP today). Strongly motivated to research, Dr. Sledge spent the next two years studying tissue and organ culture in the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England.
In 1965, he returned to Boston, joined the staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital as a practicing orthopaedic surgeon, and continued his basic research. Five years later he was chosen as the first full–time professor of orthopaedic surgery and chief of the Department of Orthopaedic surgery at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Robert Breck Brigham Hospital, soon to become the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). Dr. Sledge led the department at the BWH for 26 years. Some of his accomplishments included a major expansion in the staff (clinical and research), development of a practice plan, establishment of a research foundation, development of a cruciate retaining total knee system, a total joint registry and numerous publications on the outcomes of arthritic patients treated by total joint replacement or radiation synovectomy.
In 1985, Dr. Sledge was elected President of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Recognized as a major leader in the profession of orthopaedic surgery he received many honors and awards during his career. He was elected into the Institute of Medicine in 1992.
