Hip Surgery - An Odyssey

This text is not intended to be a history of hip surgery. It is simply a recollection of my personal experiences with hip surgery over nearly half a century. The narrative dwells, in various degrees, with ideas and procedures that have, thus far, either survived the test of time or have vanished from the scene. Experiencing successful as well as the unsuccessful events has allowed me to better appreciate the evolution of the discipline and the manner in which old ideas spawned new ones. Without any doubt, total hip arthroplasty represents one of the most important and impressive technological developments in the history of orthopedics and one that still attracts the attention of the orthopedist. Orthopedists had tried for hundreds of years to surgically relieve the pain and disability that accompany the arthritic hip joint with nothing more than occasional clinical successes. With the advent of anesthesia and later more sophisticated metallurgical advances, major progress began to take place.