The_Invention_of_Surgery

doorway and posed for a picture with Charnley or the other surgeons who
have helped make this place so famous.
Going through the doorway, I meet with Mr. Bodo Purbach, a German-
born orthopedic surgeon and the greatest devotee to Charnley, an
enthusiastic disciple who is eager to show me around at the end of a busy
workday. With a young registrar (surgical resident) in tow, we visit with
some patients who received their hip replacements earlier in the week.
Glancing around, I’m struck by the simple décor and no-frills nature of the
hospital buildings. Originally proposed by Florence Nightingale as a
means of promoting air flow, these long buildings are organized in
parallel rows; the furniture, paint, lighting, and double-occupancy of
patient rooms, appear as though they were last updated thirty years ago.
Mr. Purbach looked at me and said in his slight German accent, “And
now the fun part!”
Pulling out a cluster of keys on a large key ring, we walk to the end of
one of the buildings down a dark hallway. Now accompanied by Mr.
Lennard Funk, a shoulder surgeon, Mr. Purbach unlocks the large door
and flicks on the lights. As the fluorescent lights hum on, I’m in a museum
of sorts, with display cabinets of hip implants, dusty old curios of collected
medical device boxes, and representative samples of the history of hip
implants going back almost a century.
This is a bonanza for anyone interested in the history of medicine and
surgery, and for me; I feel like Howard Carter at the moment of
Tutankhamun’s crypt unveiling. Over against one wall is the customized
polyethylene wear testing machine that I’ve seen in journal publications
over the years in a stylized cartoon, except now I’m seeing the real thing
with my own eyes. Then, to my left is a fifty-year-old box of Charnley’s
acrylic cement. I continue to walk through the room, peering down at odds
and ends in class cabinets, the metal hip stems that Charnley designed
over the years. And then I see the polyethylene and Teflon cups.
Perhaps Charnley’s greatest contribution to mankind was the use of
polyethylene as a bearing surface for total joint replacement. Its discovery
was an accident of fate, a salesman for a German polymer company
showing up with a briefcase of gear samples, guessing that Charnley might
be interested in polymer parts for his testing machines. But his lab
assistant John Craven (and in time, Mr. Charnley), thought polyethylene
was the breakthrough material they had been searching for. To test this