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Christopher Lewis Colton (born in 1937) is an English orthopaedic surgeon and Professor Emeritus in Orthopaedic and Accident Surgery at Nottingham University. He is a past President of both the British Orthopaedic Association and of the AO Foundation.

Training and Early Career
Chris qualified in medicine and surgery in 1960, after studying at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1963. He decided to pursue a career as an orthopaedic surgeon, studying in Bristol and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London, also including a tour of duty at Dala Orthopaedic Hospital at Kano in Northern Nigeria during the Biafran civil war.

Surgical career
He was appointed as a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon in Nottingham in 1973. The University of Nottingham honoured him with a personal chair in Orthopaedic and Accident Surgery, in 1993, for his research and teaching in the field of musculoskeletal trauma.

He served as President of the British Orthopaedic Association in 1995. He held the Presidency of the AO Foundation from 1996 to 1998.

Air Crash Injuries
Chris Colton treated several casualties of the Kegworth air disaster in 1989 (in which a British Midland flight crashed onto the embankment of the M1 motorway) and he subsequently investigated the nature of the crash injuries. As a result he became a Member of the British Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) 1993-95. He then became British delegate to European Federation of Orthopaedic and Trauma Associations 1995-98. The revised brace position that he helped to develop was adopted by all UK airlines by 1999. He is a member of the International Board for Research into Aircraft Crash Events (IBRACE).

Trauma Surgery
Chris specialised in treatment of skeletal injury in both adults and children, with an emphasis on post-trauma reconstruction. Chris Colton introduced the recognised Colton Classification of Olecranon Fractures in 1973.

He assisted his colleague Robert Mulholland to treat mountaineer Doug Scott, 3 weeks after he had badly fractured both legs in 1977 near the summit of The Ogre in the Himalayas.

In September 1990, following ongoing press speculation, he reassured the public (in a front page story in The Times) that Prince Charles was recovering well from a bone graft to reunite his fractured right arm, following a polo accident in June. Chris Colton had performed the operation on the Prince in Nottingham with his colleague John Webb.

In 1991, he operated on motorcycling world champion Ron Haslam, who had sustained an open fracture of his leg in a racing crash. When Ron had fully recovered, he took Chris around the Donington Park race track on the back of a Norton motorbike.

After Kenyan conservationist Richard Leakey was critically injured (when the Cessna plane that he was piloting crashed in Kenya in 1993), Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands paid for Chris Colton to fly out to Nairobi to assess the treatment options. After ten operations in Nottingham, attempting to reconstruct his crushed legs, Chris eventually had to amputate both of Leakey's lower legs.

He retired from surgical practice in 1997, dismayed at how NHS healthcare reforms and targets were incentivising surgeons to treat fewer patients. He has though remained active as a teacher, an editor and a writer.

Chris Colton was granted Freedom of the City of London in 2007.

In 2015 he criticised the Labour Party’s inappropriate use of a fracture X-Ray in its General Election campaign.

An eponymous “Chris Colton Trauma Lecture” is delivered each year at the Nottingham University Fracture Forum.

Medical Education
Over the years Chris Colton has published articles & chapters in over 70 journals  & books, including co-authoring the medical reference book “Atlas of Orthopaedic Surgical Approaches”

He undertook visiting Professorships to the Universities of Cairo, Gothenburg, Isfahan, Kentucky, Kuala Lumpur, London, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Florida, Shiraz, Singapore, Texas and Wellington.

He was Executive Editor of the AO Surgery Reference online guide for orthopeadic surgeons 2005-11.