On Sept. 28, 1940, Dr. Austin T. Moore, an American surgeon at Johns Hopkins hospital, and Harold Ray Bohlman published an early report on metallic hip replacement in a patient. They introduced the process of fixing the femoral head to a stem that would fit the proximal femur medullary canal..

Dr. Moore inserted the first such metal prosthesis at John Hopkins Hospital in 1940. The procedure replaced the proximal twelve inches of a femur, destroyed by a recurrent giant cell tumor, with a custom made Vitallium® prosthesis.