The unhappy teenager who went into a Shropshire hospital to ask about special shoes and came out the following year six inches shorter
A teenager whose rare condition left her desperately unhappy and wanting to "hide in shame" had her life changed by a Shropshire surgeon's radical proposal - though at first she thought it was just a cruel joke the likes of which she had put up with for years.
Anne Rowston was 6ft 7.5in when she went into hospital - and when she left the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Gobowen eight months later, she was more than six inches shorter.
The story of her incredible height reduction surgery - still a rarity 60 years on - and the skills of the Shropshire surgeons made headlines from America to India.
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Just 19 when she went in, after four operations and eight months in a hospital bed Anne took her first tentative steps in May 1965 with the aid of two walking sticks as she began the process of learning to walk again on shortened legs.
When she was finally able to go home at the beginning of the following month Anne, then aged 20, was trying to manage with just one stick, and hoping to discard that soon.
"Now I will be able to go anywhere just like a normal person and be unnoticed in a crowd," she said.
The surgery led by orthopaedic surgeon David Lloyd Griffiths had seen her reduced by four inches above the knee and two inches below.
During her time in hospital she had had more than 400 letters from all over the world, including four proposals of marriage.
Anne (or Ann, spellings in reports differ) was looking forward to completely refitting her wardrobe and finding a "normal" job.
Her main interest during her lengthy stay at the orthopaedic was art, and the hospital art therapist, Donald Foster, was full of praise for her work.
She had been unhappy about her height ever since adolescence. Her pituitary gland had failed to shut down its output of growth hormone as she matured and she just kept growing to a point well over a foot taller than the average height for a woman in England (about 5ft 3in).
"I used to feel as if I had two heads," said Anne in an interview with America's Time magazine.
