Hip Joint
Hip Joint names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Hip Joint DISEASES OF THE
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
DISEASES OF THE, a disease differing in many important points from other joint-diseases. Its connection with scrofula is more distinctly marked than that of most other joint diseases, and it almost always occurs before the age of puberty. It comes on, in children or young persons of a scrofulous constitution, from very slight causes; thus, it is often traced to over-exertion in a long walk, a sprain in jumping, or a fall; and in many cases no apparent cause can be assigned. In the early stage of the disease the whole of the structures of the joint are inflamed, and by proper treatment at this period the morbid action may be sometimes subdued without any worse consequences than a more or less rigid joint. As the disease advances abscesses occur around the joint. True shortening of the limb now takes place, which at the same time becomes adducted and inverted. From this stage, if the health is pretty good, and the lungs are sound, the patient may be so fortunate as to recover with an anchylosed (or immovable) hip joint; but the probability is that exhaustion and hectic will come on, and that death will supervene.
Hip Joint one of the most important articulations in the body
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
one of the most important articulations in the body, and the most complete example of the ball-andsocket joint. The hip joint is made up of two bones-the acetabulum, or cuplike cavity in the os innominatum, or three bones forming one-half of the pelvis; and the head of the femur, or thigh-bone, the same provision being made here, by capsular, conical, transverse, and lateral ligaments, to secure the bone in its socket, and yet afford unlimited play to the limb; while, to guard it from blows and the force of accidents, the part is padded with a number of short, fleshy muscles, in addition to which a quantity of adipose tissue beneath the cuticle still further protects the part.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's anatomy of 1921 — the acetabulum, the femoral head, the surrounding ligaments and "short, fleshy muscles" — is still taught essentially as written. What has changed utterly is the clinical picture. The "hip-joint disease" linked to "scrofula" was tuberculosis of the hip, and the 1921 prognosis of abscesses, a shortened limb, an ankylosed joint or death from "exhaustion and hectic" was accurate for its day; streptomycin (1944) and later multi-drug regimens made it curable, and it is now rare in wealthy countries. A destroyed hip is also no longer a life sentence: Sir John Charnley's low-friction total hip replacement, developed at Wrightington in England in the 1960s, turned the joint into a replaceable part, and hip arthroplasty is now performed hundreds of thousands of times a year worldwide.
Written for this edition, 2026.