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The expression housemaid’s knee designates an inflammation of the bursa over the kneecap (prepatellar bursa), typically induced by kneeling on hard floors.

This expression occurs, for example, in the following letter, published in The Lincolnshire Chronicle and General Advertiser (Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England) of Friday 26^th December 1845 [page 2, column 6]:

To the EDITOR of the LINCOLNSHIRE CHRONICLE.

Sir,—I wish through the medium of your paper to call the attention of the heads of houses to the work which is required from their housemaids. I travelled from Lincoln the other day with a young woman who had been dismissed from her service because she had become diseased in her knees from kneeling on the floors to clean them! From her I learned that no mistress will allow a mop or a broom in her house—that from the carpets in the parlours to the bricks in the kitchen and the yard all is done by the servants on their knees!! This poor young woman told me that they had said at the hospital that she was crippled for life! Upon my return home a physician who happened to be at my house told me he had “many such cases, they were very common, and were called the housemaid’s knee complaint!” I am sure this hardship must arise on the part of the mistress from want of consideration, and I wish to ask every one of them whether they can reconcile it to their consciences thus to subject their fellow-creatures to such hard bondage. We have freed the slaves at a distance from us; let us turn our attention to those we have at home. If they are born to serve us, they are not born to lose the use of their limbs in carrying out our whims and fancies.—I am, Mr. Editor, your’s [sic], &c.,
A Friend of Humanity.

On a lighter note, the expression housemaid’s knee occurs in the following passage from Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1889), by the British author Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) [chapter 1, page 3]:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got […]. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

—Cf. also the phrases clergyman’s sore throat and tennis elbow.

The earliest occurrences of the expression housemaid’s knee that I have found are from medical publications—these early occurrences are as follows, in chronological order:

1-: From Observations on Injuries of the Spine and of the Thigh Bone: In two Lectures, delivered in the School of Great Windmill Street (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1824), by the Scottish anatomist, physiologist, neurologist and surgeon Charles Bell (1774-1842) [Lecture on the Thigh Bone: page 66]:

Be you then, gentlemen, assured of this, that when you see an inclination of the body upon the head of the thigh bone, you have an inflammation deep in the hip-joint to encounter; and that when your patient, with an injury in the knee-joint, has a tense corded feeling in the hamstring tendons, a formidable inflammation within the joint has commenced; and that you must employ every means to avoid destructive inflammation in the apparatus of the joint. If, on the contrary, you see a young woman with swelling and pain of the knee-joint, and do not find this position of the limb and tension of the hamstring tendons, then is the inflammation exterior to the joint, and the case is probably only the “housemaid’s knee.”

2-: From a review of An Essay addressed to the Captains of the Royal Navy, and those of the Merchants’ Service: on the means of preserving the Health of their Crews; with Directions for the Prevention of Dry Rot in Ships (London: Underwood, 1824), by Robert Finlayson, M.D., surgeon in the navy—review published in The Lancet (London, England) of Saturday 10^th December 1825 [page 381, column 2]:

It would not “be endless to enumerate the diseases of the knee-joint so excited,” as our author has it, for in truth there is but one, which consists in an enlargement of the bursæ of the joint, and is commonly called the housemaid’s knee, but we never saw it in a sailor.

3-: From Critical Analysis of Select Hospital Reports in the Lancet, published in The Medico-chirurgical Review, and Journal of Practical Medicine (London, England) of October 1827 [page 530, column 2]:

No. 204, July 28^th. […] Affections of the Knee-Joint. […] The young gentleman takes the knee-joint under his especial protection […]. He accordingly commences the good work by detailing, what? Why, nothing more nor less than a couple of cases of “housemaid’s knee.”