Papers Presented at the Hip Society Meetings 2006: Comment on the Classics

We are republishing Classic Articles which were presented prior to 1996 so our readers will have access to all of them online. The three classic papers republished herein describe some of the milestones in the ongoing evolution of reconstructive hip surgery. Royal Whitman, in the 1920s, had found hip fusion unsatisfactory because of the difficulty of achieving it surgically and because of the functional limitations it imposed on patients when the procedure was successful. In this paper, he advocated a resection arthroplasty with removal of the femoral head, insertion of the femoral neck into the acetabulum, distal transfer of the greater trochanter, and prolonged immobilization in a spica cast with the hip in wide abduction. He had done this procedure on only seven patients, however, and could report followups of less than a year. Nevertheless, he enthusiastically endorsed the procedure.

Smith-Petersen, the legendary orthopaedic chairman at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, described the evolution of his cup arthroplasty in the second republished paper, and Austin Moore in the third reports on how he and Dr. Harold Bohlman at Johns Hopkins invented and used the first successful vitallium femoral head prosthesis secured with a long stem. They used an extramedullary stem in the assigned case but Austin Moore soon changed this design and thereafter secured fixation with a prosthesis with an intramedullary configuration.