Ralph Bingham Cloward

Ralph Bingham Cloward (born in Salt Lake City, Utah, September 24, 1908, died November 13, 2000) was an American neurosurgeon. He attended the University of Hawaii, finished college in Utah in 1930, thereafter medical school in Utah and finished his degree as a medical doctor at Rush Medical School in Chicago in 1934. He attended as a resident at the University of Chicago under Dr. Bailey. He thereafter moved to Hawaii, where he became the archipelago's first practising neurosurgeon (until 1944). In connection with the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, he performed 44 craniotomies in 4 days .

Dr. Cloward remains renowned for his contribution to spinal neurosurgery. He developed the technique called Posterior Lumbosacral Interbody Fusion (PLIF) and Anterior Cervical Interbody Fusion, the latter also known as Cloward procedure.