JOINT DISEASE

any of the diseases and injuries that affect human joints. Although there are many others, arthritis is no doubt the best known of such diseases. Diseases of the joints may be variously short-lived or exceedingly chronic, agonizingly painful or merely nagging and uncomfortable; they may be confined to one joint or may affect many parts of the skeleton. For the purposes of this article two principal categories are distinguished: joint diseases in which inflammation is the principal set of signs or symptoms; and diseases, called noninflammatory in this article, in which inflammation may be present to some degree, as after an injury, but is not the essential feature. Additional reading W.S.C. Copeman, A Short History of the Gout and the Rheumatic Diseases (1964), a scholarly history of arthritis and rheumatism, and (ed.), Textbook of the Rheumatic Diseases, 4th ed. (1969); and J.L. Hollander and D.J. McCarty (eds.), Arthritis and Allied Conditions, 8th ed. (1972); L. Sokoloff, The Biology of Degenerative Joint Disease (1969), a systematic consideration of the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis; and J.H. Talbott, Gout, 3rd ed. (1967).