Surgeons, Manufacturers and Patients A Transatlantic History of Total Hip Replacement

The Total Hip Replacement, or Artificial Hip, was invented by British surgeons after World War Two. It became the basis of a multi-billion global industry in joint replacement. This pioneering study ranges from inventive surgeons to multi-national manufacturers, including technologies, collaborations, regulations, quality assessments, and the changing expectations of patients. It explores total hip replacement in the very different health economies of the U.K. and the U.S., asking searching questions about costs as well as benefits.

JULIE ANDERSON is a Research Associate in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK. Her areas of research include the history of disability and blindness and she has published on disability and gender sport and medicine and with Carsten Timmermann edited Devices and Designs: Medical Technologies in Historical Perspective. She is currently completing a book on the history of rehabilitation in the Second World War.

FRANCIS NEARY is a Research Associate at CHSTM, University of Manchester, UK. After completing his doctoral thesis on human consciousness and scientific biography in the late nineteenth century at the University of Lancaster, he worked on the history of psychiatry in the twentieth century at the University of Exeter. More recently at CHSTM, he has been researching on the history of material culture and innovation in joint replacement technologies and he has curated three exhibitions on the past, present and future of hip replacement.

JOHN V. PICKSTONE has worked in Manchester since 1974, and founded the Wellcome Unit and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK, in 1986. He directed the Centre to 2002, since when he has been a Research Professor. His present research is mostly on recent medicine, especially on cancer services, medical technology, and the NHS around Manchester. He is the author of Ways of Knowing: a New History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and editor, with Roger Cooter of The Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century.