Strong personal opinion, previous training, and favorable past experience with one particular technique dictate any given surgeon's choice of procedure for ankle arthrodesis. But are these criteria valid for the selection of one technique over another? For information on this point, critical evaluation of the several surgical techniques used in a large series of such cases is attempted in this paper. Included in the evaluation are such matters as type of fixation, time required for clinical union, and end results. Materials and Methods This study concerns 132 patients who underwent arthrodesis of the ankle (140 surgical procedures) at the Mayo Clinic in the years 1956 through 1963. Included were those patients with tibiotalar fusion only, those with tibiotalar and talocalcaneal fusion, those with tibiotalar fusion combined with triple arthrodesis (pantalar fusion), and those with partial or complete loss of the talus and subsequent arthrodesis of the tibia to the os