Introduction (Review of Literature)

Abstract

The relationship between mechanical stress and bone morphology has been one of the focal points of research on the nature of the skeleton for more than a century (Wolff 1892; Fick 1911; Roux 1912). More recently, Thompson (1942), Cowin (1986), Frost (1986) and Carter (1987) were able to demonstrate that the morphology of any bone, at any single instant in time, is the sequential expression of all the stresses to which the tissue has been subjected over a long period. It was Braus (1920) who first put into words the idea that morphology is a historical record of events and Carter et al. (1989) used the extremely telling expression, “loading history” (of the bone).