A short note about the history of hip replacement with a collection of rare photographs from my old implant collection. Anthony White (1782-1849) of the Westminster Hospital in London, is credited with the first excision arthroplasty in 1821, but he never published his work. The surgery removed pain and preserved mobility, but at the cost of stability. His pioneering efforts gained him recognition in the medical community, as described in his obituary appearing in Lancet.
Subsequently, Vitezlav Chlumsky (1867-1943), working in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) experimented with many inter-positional materials. He experimented with muscle, celluloid, silver plates, rubber struts, magnesium zinc, glass, pyres, decalcified bones, wax and celluloid. Professor Themistocles Glück (1853-1942) from Berlin did painstaking experiments in the development of hip arthroplasty. In 1891, Glück…
