dr. William G. Hamilton, who spent more than 40 years as an attending orthopedic surgeon for New York City Ballet repairing bone spurs, tendonitis, bursitis, torn ligaments, and what he called “the Nutcracker Fracture,” died March 29 at his home in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 90.
His wife, Linda Hamilton, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Ballet dancers can be the “athletes of God,” as Albert Einstein supposedly said. But until Dr. Hamilton, they were treated more as ethereal beings than physical bodies that could crack, tear and otherwise fall apart under the extreme and often unnatural pressure of repeated pliés and grand jetés.
In fact, it was George Balanchine, the choreographer who famously insisted that his dancers stoically work through their stubbed toes and sprained ankles, who made Dr. Hamilton asked to become the first family doctor for the 100-plus members of the New York City Ballet, 1972.
dr. Hamilton immediately said yes, although he knew nothing about ballet. He immersed himself in the art, taking weekend classes and becoming close to Balanchine and, later, the dancer and choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who hired him in 1980 as the attending surgeon for American Ballet Theater.
dr. Hamilton, a six-foot-tall southerner, became a favorite and even revered figure at Lincoln Center. He had a disarming way of sleeping that put young dancers at ease when they came to him, afraid a sprained ankle would end their career.
He kept a ballet barre in his exam room and was known to catch early signs of chronic, potentially debilitating problems by simply having a dancer perform a few routine moves.
He realized early on that although dancers suffered the same kinds of injuries as athletes, they got them in obscure ways and places. He saw, for example, that the fast movements required by Balanchine’s ballets were associated with the risk of foot and ankle injuries, while the jumps that were more common under Baryshnikov posed a greater threat to hips and knees.
“I learned from the beginning that although they get the same injuries as athletes, dancers are artists first,” he told Dance Magazine in 2011.
When Dr. Hamilton began in the early 1970s, there was no such thing as dance medicine, and indeed foot and ankle injuries were a largely under-researched area of orthopedic medicine.
He built up both fields through lectures and journal articles diagnosing previously underreported injuries — he was one of the first to describe the nutcracker fracture, for example, where multiple breaks occur in the cuboid bone in the foot. From 1992 to 1993, he was president of the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society, and today every major dance company in the country has an orthopedic surgeon available.
“Bill was the king of orthopedic dance medicine,” Glenn Pfeffer, co-director of the Cedars-Sinai/USC Glorya Kaufman Dance Medicine Center, said in a telephone interview.
dr. Hamilton continued to perform surgeries until he was 81 and consulted until a few years ago, long after most doctors would have hung up their scalpels.
“I would have retired long ago if it weren’t for the dancers,” he said in a 2016 interview with Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine. “It’s very rewarding because they love what they do. They just want to dance; they wouldn’t want to do anything else.”
William Garnett Hamilton didn’t want to be a doctor in Manhattan, let alone a ballet man. He was born on January 11, 1932, in Altus, Okla., where his father, Milton Hamilton, was a salesman and his mother, Elizabeth (Garnett) Hamilton, was a homemaker.
The family moved to Shreveport, La., when he was very young. After his parents divorced, his mother remarried and she moved to Portage, Wisconsin, where her new husband owned a plastic manufacturing business.
William graduated from Princeton in 1954 with a degree in engineering, and after two years in the military, he joined his stepfather’s Wisconsin company. He married and had a child; by his mid-twenties, he said, he could see his whole life unfolding before him. He didn’t like what he saw.
Against his parents’ wishes that he stay to run the family business, he applied to medical school. He was accepted to Columbia, one of the few schools that accepted older students (he was 28 when he enrolled). He decided to focus on orthopedics – a field he believed to be a lot like engineering, with muscles and joints taking the place of ropes and levers. He graduated in 1964 and, after several years of residency, opened a practice in Midtown Manhattan in 1969.
In addition to his work with the two ballet companies, he provided similar services to the company’s member schools, the School of American Ballet and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, and advised for numerous Broadway shows and sports teams in New York, including the Knicks and the Yankees.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. He met his future third wife, Linda Homek, when she was a dancer with the New York City Ballet. She later earned a PhD in psychology from Adelphi University. In 2000, she and Dr. Hamilton set up a multidisciplinary wellness team, including a dietitian and a gastroenterologist, to care for the company’s dancers, a model that has since been adopted by other ballet companies.
Together with his wife, Dr. Hamilton survived by his sister, Ann Kirk; his sons, William Jr. and Lewis; and three grandchildren.
