ABSTRACT
The concept of a condition in which physiologically weakened bone contributes to excessive fractures has developed over the past 180 years. The earliest description in the English literature of osteoporotic fracture and identification of factors that place an individual at high risk for the condition appeared in the early 1820s.1 Sir Astley Cooper noted that the London hospital wards of Guys’ and St Thomas’ were ‘seldom without an example of fracture of the neck of the thighbone.’ He observed that, ‘women are much more likely to this species of fracture than men,’ and that it ‘seldom happens but at an advanced period of life.’ He attributed the predilection for women to the ‘comparative feebleness of the female constitution’ and the relationship with old age to a deteriorating balance between ‘absorption and deposition’ (which he thought was due to diminishing arterial blood flow and unspecified ‘absorbents’).1
