[50 years of total hip prosthesis--a tribute to Prof. Sir John Charnley]

November 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of the first implantation of a successful and long-lived hip endoprosthesis, which was performed by Prof Sir John Charnley in the "Centre for Hip Surgery" at a small country place in the north-west England. John Charnley (1911-1982) finished medical school at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1935, and than started training in orthopaedics at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, and completed it after the Second World War, in which he served as a volunteer. After that he continued working in the same hospital, and, apart from that he worked as a lecturer at the University of Manchester, and from 1949 as a visiting surgeon in the Wrightington Hospital. In 1958 Charnley decided to put his efforts into the development of hip replacement research and surgery, and initiated the foundation of the "Centre for Hip Surgery" with Biomechanical laboratory in the Wrightington Hospital in 1960, where the intesive basic and clinical research started, and becuase of that Charnley in 1962 left Manchester and moved with a full time practice at the Wrightington Hospital. That period of research time was not easy, there were many "trial and tribulations", but, owing to the tenacity and inventive mind of Charnley, in 1962 a new prosthesis consisting of a cemented metal stem with a 22 mm head articulating with a cemented polyethilene acetabular component, and with a low frictional torque was designed. The first such prosthesis, which later produced excellent long-term results, was implanted on November 22nd, 1962, and today, when we look back over a distance of fifty years, we can conclude that that day could be considered as a beginning of a modem aloarthroplastic surgery, and certainly as one of the greatest orthopaedic advance in the whole of the 20th century; and all that was initiated and promoted by Prof. Sir John Charnley.