History of Calcium Phosphates in Regenerative Medicine

Abstract

The historical development of a scientific knowledge on calcium orthophosphates from the 1770s until 1950 is described. The chosen time scale starts with the earliest available studies of the 1770s (to the best of my findings, calcium orthophosphates had been unknown before), passes through the entire nineteenth century, and finishes in 1950, because since then the amount of publications on calcium orthophosphates rapidly increased and the subject became too broad. In addition, since publications of the second half of the twentieth century are easily accessible, the substantial amount of them has been already reviewed by other scientists. Many forgotten and poorly known historical facts and approaches have been extracted from the old publications. Then they have been analyzed, systematized, and reconsidered from the modern point of view. The reported historical findings clearly demonstrate that many famous scientists of the past contributed to calcium orthophosphate investigations. Furthermore, the significant quantity of the scientific facts and experimental approaches appears to have been known for very many decades, and, in fact, a good deal of the relatively recent investigations on the subject is just either a further development of the earlier studies or a rediscovery of the already forgotten knowledge.