Word: charnley
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...occasion was the granting of a major medical award to the man who made possible her recovery and that of thousands of others: British Surgeon John Charnley, 63, who last week won the Albert and Mary Lasker Award for clinical research ($10,000) for developing the modern artificial hip joint...
...Charnley, a surgeon at England's Wrightington Hospital in Wigan, was not the first physician to replace part of the hip's ball-and-socket joint. Doctors had long been substituting a stainless-steel ball for the head of the femur, or thighbone. But even after the introduction of better bone cements eliminated one problem-the tendency of the new head to work loose-the results of the operation were often unsatisfactory. Because body fluids provided inadequate lubrication and even corroded the implants, friction between the ball and its socket caused both to wear...
...Charnley began to search for materials that would require no lubrication. He first tried Teflon, but the material tended to wear badly in the hip joint. Then he made a serendipitous discovery. Although Charnley had turned away a salesman who tried to interest him in high-density polyethylene, his laboratory assistant, eager to use idle test apparatus, tried four samples of the tough plastic. The material tested so successfully that in 1962, Charnley adopted it for hip sockets...
...Until Charnley, victims of advanced arthritis or injuries to the hip were often permanently crippled. Now, in the U.S. alone, many of the 15,000 patients a year who undergo the Charnley operation are not only back on their feet, but dancing...
Since July 1966, when I had the privilege of introducing Charnley's operation in this country, many centers have adopted it, including Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the University of Illinois Hospitals in Chicago, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and Massachusetts General and New England Baptist hospitals in Boston. It would be less than fair to omit mention of these major teaching institutions that remain in the van of orthopedic practice in this country...